Concerns For The Profession I Love

I didn’t always want to be a teacher. Initially, bedazzled by careers I’d seen mostly on films and TV which looked much more exciting, I’d held brief childish dreams of becoming something a little more glamourous – like a gritty, New York detective, which is probably quite a tough profession to enter if you’re born in Blyth, to be honest – but those fleeting aspirations quickly passed once I’d been inspired by three MFL teachers in my formative years. Mr Batey, Mr Robeson and Mr Frankland, the latter of whom sadly passed away a couple of years ago, all fired a spark in me which no one else really could, and for their influence upon my life I will always be incredibly grateful.

And I’ve loved being a teacher, as well as a leader in various guises, ever since I joined the teaching profession in 1996. It’s a superb job that I will always have a genuine passion for, even if it’s not without its obvious challenges. My career thus far has taken me to three distinct areas of England and more latterly to the Middle East and in all of the schools where I’ve plied my trade I’ve continued to work alongside colleagues who not only clearly share my passion and love for teaching but who also have inspired and influenced me like the role models of my youth. There is, however, something sadly very wrong with the teaching profession currently, and that is that too many of its professionals are leaving it and too few graduates are choosing it as a career choice.

The reasons for this are well documented and have led to the recently announced strikes by union members in the UK, all of which I would fully support were I also to be working there at the moment. The facts around teacher retention make for grim reading, with an article in The Guardian recently noting that “Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in the last decade have since left the profession.” Indeed, according to a Labour analysis of DfE statistics, of just under 270,000 teachers who qualified in England between 2011 and 2020, more than 81,000 have since left the profession, or three in ten of the total. More recently, 13% of teachers in England who have qualified since the last general election in December 2019 quit in the subsequent two years, about 3,000 in total. It’s also worth noting that one consequence of this high dropout rate is that the average age of teachers in England is much lower than in comparable countries. Startlingly, just 18% of UK teachers currently are over 50. Clearly, a view of teaching as a lifelong commitment has become a rarity in the UK (and even rarer among men: at the last count, 75.5% of teachers in England were female).

But let’s back to the reasons behind the numbers for a moment. Personally, I didn’t enter teaching to get rich, and I doubt that many of my colleagues over the years did either. This doesn’t mean, however, that we either don’t need money or that we shouldn’t be well paid. At the very least, in my opinion, teachers should be rewarded financially in line with the huge importance of the profession. The reality, however, is quite frankly that, in the UK, they aren’t. In real terms, the pay of education professionals has fallen sharply since 2009 (by 9.7% in secondary and 11.8% in primary and early years), as capital and other budgets have also shrunk. In addition, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, senior teachers in England have in effect had their pay cut by £6,600 since 2010. The independent economics research institute calculated that long-serving and senior teachers – accounting for nearly a third of those working in England – would have earned the equivalent of £50,300 in 2010. But below-inflation wage increases over the past 12 years has meant their pay in 2022 was just £43,700. Disputing these facts, as the current UK government are presently, is a ridiculous show of disrespect to teachers and senior leaders in schools everywhere, as are articles such as this one by a colleague who was once a Head Teacher alongside side me in a Local Authority which pretty much states that teachers should just get on with things and stop complaining. Also, regarding the latest suggestions by the current Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, that teachers should be paid more than their colleagues depending upon the subject that they teach (no, really!), let’s all just agree that this is probably the worst in a long line of ridiculous thoughts by a Conservative Education Secretary ever, shall we? Good job that she’ll only be in post for about a month if we base things on the longevity of recent appointments.

So, yeah, things aren’t too rosy in the English educational garden at the moment and it’s surely no surprise that we find ourselves in the midst of a huge recruitment and retention crisis, something which I’ve written about myself before. To be honest, you know that the situation is really getting out of hand when former Ofsted HMIs – erstwhile rapid enforcers of the DfE’s whims – write letters condemning current government policy and which include comments such as the following: “I joined the teaching profession in the mid-1960s for a lifelong career in an optimistic, expanding education service being given increased respect, staffing and other resources. The current situation is very different. I joined too because of the relatively great but still conditional autonomy offered to me to exercise initiative, develop new ideas of my own and ‘make a difference’ to the 46 primary-aged children I taught. That autonomy has now been drastically curtailed by an intrusive, demoralising, distrustful accountability system.”

In the UK currently, and especially in England, teachers in far too many schools are not paid adequately, are overworked – often via utterly pointless demands from senior leaders but which perhaps understandably stem from external accountability pressures – and toil each day in cultures where mistrust is too frequently present. No wonder we’re struggling. This year, more than at any time since I decided to leave the UK and to work abroad instead, I am really noticing that there are fewer applicants than ever before for positions in our school and, most worryingly perhaps, that the overall quality of applications has taken a tumble as well. There are still some excellent professionals in there, but you’ve got to look harder than ever to find them and you have to move more quickly than ever to snap them up.

What I’ve really discovered in amongst the slimmer pickings of applicants is that so many (not all, to be clear, but definitely a majority) have seemingly lost the art of writing an effective cover letter. In too many cases this year, applications are obviously generic and are simply not personalised at all to the school. At the top of scores of letters, applicants haven’t even bothered to state who it’s intended for and instead they just steam right into the ’I want a job in a school’ bit. In the paragraphs that follow, there’s no mention of the school they’re applying for at all, because presumably the same letter is just being sent to loads of different places and it’s far too much trouble to chop and change each application. I followed this up in an interview recently with a candidate who maybe could have been a good teacher for us, and the response was along the lines of ‘yeah, I don’t really care where I work next year I just want out of where I currently am’. This, to be clear to applicants everywhere, is a massive turn off for heads and principals. If someone applies to work in the school that I’m currently leading, for instance, I want it to be clear right from the get-go that they really, really want to work in this school specifically and, more importantly, that they can tell me why this actually is and why they’d be a really good fit for us.

Similarly, although CVs have, for safeguarding reasons, mostly disappeared in the UK, they’re still very much a thing internationally, so applicants will need to create one if they’re applying to work abroad. As with any task in education, you might as well do this properly and effectively if it lands in your inbox. Some of the CVs that have been sent to us recently, however, look like they’ve been knocked up by in five minutes by blindfolded toddlers wearing boxing gloves. You don’t often get a second chance to make a first impression, and applicants should always at least seem to care about getting this aspect of communicating with a potential future employer right, even if it’s not something they’d usually do.

So, I’m really concerned about what’s happening to the profession I still love deeply, as you can probably tell. I know that it’s really hard for heads in the UK to establish positive working cultures when they’re battered at every turn by current educational policy, underfunding, public perception of the profession and the recruitment and retention crisis which is starting to be seen internationally as well, so I really do sympathise. Out here, without the aforementioned challenges, it’s clearly not quite so hard to cultivate and maintain a climate which helps you to retain your strongest teachers, but there are still some hurdles to overcome, as there are in any environment. To my mind, senior leaders have a duty and a responsibility to the wider profession itself as well as to just the individual schools they currently serve, so treating colleagues well and making teaching appear to be a profession worth staying in because it can be enjoyed each day is something we all need to prioritise.

Personally, I’m not going anywhere – I’m staying in education for as long as I still have something to offer, because I love the job and I love making the difference alluded to in the disgruntled HMI letter earlier. I just hope that enough other professionals also continue to feel the same way over the coming years because if they don’t then there might not be enough of us left to keep the profession going. Without brilliant schools and without superb teachers who inspire so many of our young people, our societies just won’t function effectively at all, so why we don’t look after our teachers in the manner they clearly deserve will always be a genuine mystery to me.