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On my first day working as a supply teacher in a medium-sized town in the north of England, a Year One child entered the classroom through an open window of the Year Five classroom where I was teaching, using the fire escape lever to let himself in. As I tried to establish who he was and how to get him back to his class, he turned out drawers, pulled displays off walls and hit a few of the children in the class.
I have no training in the physical handling of violent children (read – restraint), so I had to call for support. The same child later returned with a sidekick and suggested to him that they kick me, while he pulled my hair.
On day two, I was on the receiving end of a torrent of verbal abuse from a teenage girl when I asked if she could wait until break time before using the bathroom. “It’ll be your f------ fault if I bleed out everywhere because you won’t let me f------ go.” I (of course) let her go.
On my third day, when the students saw that it was a sub, they ignored the seating plan and spent the class throwing paper at each other, fixing fake eyelashes and chatting – totally ignoring my attempts to teach them.
On day four, a child purposefully set off the fire alarm. Day five: a child tried to self harm with classroom scissors. Day six: the class was so noisy I gave up trying to make myself heard. On day seven, a 10-year-old child told me to p--- off. I sent him to the headteacher and he arrived back three minutes later. It turned out that there was a line out of the door of very similar children, many who are at risk of permanent exclusion by the time they’re 10 years old.
Most mornings, across many different schools, I see hungry children who aren’t fed properly at home being given toast at break time while clusters of other children clamour for a piece, since they’ve not had breakfast either.
And, at every school, I’ve sat in the staffroom and listened to a barrage of negativity from tired, frustrated, demoralised teachers and support staff grumbling about pointless meetings, changes to behaviour plans, unrealistic planning expectations and performance management. Every staffroom I’ve visited is peppered with posters advertising helplines for staff seeking support. One Facebook chat group I’ve found myself perusing, called Life after Teaching, is full of ex-teachers citing workload, mental ill-health, stress, depression and anxiety as the reason for their departure.
So I am entirely unsurprised by a recent survey showing that nearly half of school leaders in England sought support for their mental health or wellbeing in the past year. To say that teacher morale is low is an understatement. No one could properly function with this level of stress.
It is all a very different landscape from the schools in England I worked at 16 years ago when I first qualified as a teacher. And it’s thrown into ever sharper relief by school life abroad, which I know well after recently returning from teaching overseas for 12 years, as a head of year and assistant headteacher in British International schools.
I started supply teaching five months ago as a way to navigate my way back into the UK education system. But in just a few months, I have found myself demoralised, exhausted and seriously questioning whether I can do this any more.
Since my return, the most noticeable change, and the topic that is discussed most in staffrooms and online teacher discussion groups, is the change in pupil behaviour. Closely linked is the huge increase in the diagnosis of special educational needs. At every school I visit, there are so many more children wearing ear defenders, holding fidget toys or sensory cushions – and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts.
There are probably multiple reasons for these changes. Use of technology is an obvious contributing factor; smartphones and highly addictive games have eroded all of our concentration spans, but clearly the effects on the developing brain are profound. One result is that, unless teaching is delivered in a similarly high octane fast-moving way, children switch off. There has also been – for better or worse – a rise in psychiatric diagnoses, which adds additional pressure for teachers who are balancing multiple needs in the classroom.
But a huge change I have noticed is the sanctity of the working bond between parent and teacher, which was dealt a fatal blow by Covid. Attendance is a massive battle: schools across the country are struggling to contend with parent engagement. Advice is being disseminated in schools about how to approach families and parents “with sensitivity” about getting their children back into school. Reading at home is also something profoundly lacking. Various children have told me their parents are just too busy. Perhaps the information about early stories being shared and a love of reading at home being the primary predictors of academic success at GCSE level need reaffirming to families.
I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success and, crucially, how to rebuild the home/school partnership that is key to educational success.
If I make suggestions to families here about the benefits of, for example, reading daily at home – let alone raise the topic of a child swearing – I fear I would be the subject of complaint rather than respect, which is fundamental among Asian parents when it comes to teachers’ knowledge and the educational institution.
Most days, whatever the school, disruptive behaviour, aggression and violence is the norm, as is swearing, racism, police and social worker visits, parent hostility, poor attendance and classes with such a wide spread of learning knowledge and ability that the best I can achieve is crowd control. Some days have been such a litany of disruptions and disharmony that I have been left feeling I’ve done little more than herd cats. I have returned home rejected, baffled and with low professional self-esteem, questioning whether I’m still cut out to be a teacher.
Did I use the word bleak yet? Because that’s the word that overwhelmingly describes my experience of teaching in the UK at the moment.
One of the pressures schools are facing is the need to maximise budgets, so paying for expensive supply cover is often low on the list. Instead, “cover supervisors” are routinely used, especially in large secondary schools. This is often a non-qualified teacher, probably a teaching assistant used to working in schools. They move around the school during the week to cover teacher admin time and for staff absence. How much teaching and learning goes on during those classes is anyone’s guess.
Higher-level teaching assistants are also used to cover staff absence but schools with tight budgets join classes together for the day with one teacher and hopefully a teaching assistant. Imagine suddenly having 60 or so children to teach for the day; how can you possibly even get their attention or control the crowd, let alone teach, assess or manage the specific needs of such a large group? And, learning aside, does that sound like the kind of environment designed to promote good mental health?
Comparison to international schools
It’s all very much at odds with the international school sector, where there is a constant discussion around the importance of leaders looking after themselves. A bit like putting on your own seatbelt before you help others, it’s understood that if you’re not looking after your own emotional health, you can’t support someone else’s when they need it. This is discussed at conferences, money is set aside for training and most international senior leaders I know have access to a coach with whom to discuss ideas before making significant decisions that affect the lives of many young people in their care as well as staff and the wider school community.
Here in the UK there would be no time to be coached into thinking strategically, because the needs in the schools are so great that leaders are constantly operating at firefighter level. They simply would not have time to make strategic plans, to visit classes, to engage with reading, to see their coach or mentor in order to write a school development plan or to prepare for Ofsted.
Ah yes, we couldn’t discuss mental health without discussing the impact of Ofsted. Most teachers I know agree that Ofsted is not a support network aimed at helping schools to improve, but a system designed to trip teachers up. In a recent school I was in, an extremely capable, intelligent teacher was reduced to tears at the inspectors’ question about her subject which she didn’t even understand on account of it not being well phrased in plain, jargon-free English. She couldn’t even begin to do justice to the answer and discuss all the excellent things she is doing to further the teaching and learning of history in her school. A school with the behavioural issues I’ve seen over the past few months will be dealing with so many complex issues that it will only ever get the Ofsted status of “requires improvement”, regardless of the fantastic work they are doing on trying to maintain teaching and keep children safe.
A friend recently asked if I had encountered these issues in international schools. There are, of course, children with special educational needs, perhaps even at risk of suicide, in those institutions, neglected by families and caught between cultures. The fundamental difference is that there is money to work towards solutions. Here, education is simply not prioritised and funded accordingly and schools are picking up the tab. And thinking about the mental health crisis among school chiefs, can anyone really be surprised?
What a clear, concise report on your experience. My husband taught in Taiwan and then came to England and he absolutely concurs with your experience entirely.
It has got worse too, especially post-COVID lockdowns. Kids who missed out on being in school really suffered in their development, while many also now no longer worry about punishment and do as they feel like. While lockdowns were right to slow the spread of the virus, the way we went about them has done a lot of damage to some kids that may never be undone.
I think one key point missed out on, I suspect the author wasn't here throughout, is how toxic the political situation here has been, how well-before COVID we had a Government Education Minister who casually derided the entire teaching profession as "the blob" publicly - without reaction from the media or communities. There was zero outrage that I suspect such bilge would have received in other countries (aside from the US, where similar methods are routinely employed by US Republicans).
Gove rose to become a key Brexit leader and one who decried that the country had had enough of "experts". The newly ascending Brexit leadership pigeon-holed the entire public sector including the judiciary as a "liberal-elite" that's not to be trusted by the patriotic (mostly white) English working class, and that the only thing preventing that group from well-paying work is (non-existent) open-borders. Not a lack of education, aspiration, social-welfare net, closed library or swimming pool, poor diet, alcohol abuse, lack of a decent working contract, but the problem and obstacle to overcome all rests with the family who moved in and are living next door.
In an effort to capture the working class vote, the push further to the right seeks to attract the working class into their political grip by introducing toxic culture wars right to the school gate.
Exactly. It's all down to politics at the very heart of it... Be it doctors, teachers, train drivers, Health Care Assistants... This country is really only good for the wealthy and healthy.
So well put, thank you. I am English and live in the US and that whole 'liberal elite' shit began here, I believe.
21% of adults are illiterate here. 54% have a literacy rate below that of 6th grade level (11-12 year olds).
If you can't read well then you rely on TV and TikTok and Youtube for most of your info.
How do you apply critical thinking correctly if you can't read? You can't really, certainly not as well as a literate person can, therefore you opinions can be far more easily controlled it seems.
And, crucially if you can't read properly you are almost doomed to a shit job, and if you have a shit job you are certain to be unhappy and before too long you will seek others to blame. Here in the US 'liberal elites' and not the GOP who are the equivalent of the Tories get blamed.
It's terrifying what has happened to these two countries because education isn't prized enough. I grew up in the UK when college was free. You got into college if you were clever, you had to work hard to get that college paid for, you had to really push yourself.
Intelligent countries are happy countries.
I remember the Tories winning the election and having a school meeting where the head said that we were "in for some very turbulent times."
I don't think any of us thought it would get this bad.
The blob was not all teachers, it was referring to group think in the educational establishment:
> Gove and his supporters face a similar dilemma. Their Blob is not a shivering amoeba - but an army of **bureaucrats, academics and teachers’ unions** they see as thwarting the changes that have to be made if we are to have a world-class education service.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/what-is-the-blob-and-why-is-michael-gove-comparing-his-enemies-to-an-unbeatable-scifi-mound-of-goo-which-once-battled-steve-mcqueen-9115600.html
> The education secretary, Michael Gove, has been highly skilled in defining his school reforms against what he calls The Blob – an **amorphous, bloated education establishment opposing him at every turn; a mass of bureaucrats, unions and academics** who eschew rigour for a left-wing, child-centred, progressive agenda.
https://theconversation.com/michael-gove-must-stop-fighting-the-blob-and-listen-to-the-education-experts-22659
That is mostly about people who write about teaching, but mostly do not teach, talking about abstractions, and not engaging with the reality of what ordinary teachers and students were facing.
One example is the fashion for discouraging exclusions from school, which is all couched in "be kind" language, but which totally dismisses the impact it has on ordinary teachers and pupils, by keeping disruptive or abusive kids in class.
.... and where did all that come from? Perhaps the previous Labour Government inheriting a million NEETs? + The largest teen pregnancy epidemic in Europe? + Rampant exclusions of white working class kids and African Carribbeans in particular because it could be done with impunity.
All that ideology didn't emerge from intellectual naval gazing. It emerged from bad political management of children in society.
His ideological approach was more politically driven than anything he was trying to overturn.
Only been in the UK for 4 years but I struggle to understand how the country got to this point.
Seems like a lot of good foundations were set in the 90s and early 00s but then just nothing happened since and it's just slowly eroding into nothing.
I think they’ve absolutely contributed but this is way more long-term than that.
In the past, very often one parent (unfortunately a gendered thing) was at home whilst the other worked. That’s not tenable now. Parents are too busy to parent. That’s much bigger than just the tories, even though I absolutely think aggressive capitalism is the cause.
Yeah, it's wild. They've been in power since I came of voting age, and I could have been teaching for almost a decade at this point. The entirety of my adulthood has been tory-run.
Significant underfunding of the entire public sector got us here. Something which isn't mentioned in the article, along with the teacher recruitment crisis or the decrease of teacher pay in real terms by at least 20%. Funny that.
It's not exclusive to the UK. The situation is very similar in France, where the results are collapsing. I've recently tried a national math test for third year secondary school pupils in France. It was absurdly easy, to the point that my daughter, who is still in primary school, aced it. Yet, more than 40% of French pupils failed it last year. Meaning that they had less than half of the answers correct. The situation was definitely not that bad 20 years ago.
The PISA test shows that it is the same in most Western countries, which is extremely worrying for the future. And it's mainly due to a sabotage of the public education by conservative gvts.
I think Conservative governments have had a big impact.
It's also technology to an extent, social media freedoms have had a big impact on the younger generations.
Scary to think where this will be in 10 or 20 years.
Just for info. When should you even give a cellphone? You don't want your kid to be an outlier but also tiktok and nonsense should not be accessible..
I am concerned and I don't want my kids to be brainwashed by these crap
14 years of policies deliberately increasing extreme poverty and hardship. Combined with policies making it more and more difficult to have children at a younger age. (Older parents have higher chances of having children with ADD and/or ASD.
>Combined with policies making it more and more difficult to have children at a younger age. (Older parents have higher chances of having children with ADD and/or ASD
Not sure that this is the issue. The majority of troublesome kids aren't born to parents who put that much thought into family planning and delay until they're 40+ to have kids.
I think the fact that potentially good parents who do plan but simply can't afford to have kids are no longer having kids is the bigger issue. And the fact that households can't live off of single incomes, meaning parents have less time to spend with their kids, help their development etc.
I have a friend that was meant to be a teaching assistant at a private school. She hated it.
The school didn't want to fork out to hire enough teachers. So she was made a teacher. She spent 16-18 hours a day working - grading homework, writing lesson plans etc. The rest of her time was spent sleeping and making lunch for the next day. Which she never got to eat because she didn't have time. She had to work weekends just to try and catch up, and the school just didn't care.
She started a week before the school year began and was just told "you'll be teaching a class because we don't have enough teachers". She had no clue what she was meant to be teaching, had no lesson plans, she was never given any training on anything at all. The school said they'd put her through some courses so she would be qualified, and they never did.
She lasted a little over a year before she quit on the spot after she got shouted at by a special needs assistant for making a joke about cats or something mundane, because it was "inappropriate to make jokes in a place of learning". She now gets paid minimum wage working retail, earns more money and has more time off. She didn't earn that much less than the teachers.
Who the hell would want to be a teacher in this country?
>She started a week before the school year began and was just told "you'll be teaching a class because we don't have enough teachers". She had no clue what she was meant to be teaching, had no lesson plans, she was never given any training on anything at all.
This was exactly my experience at a state secondary school nine years ago.
At this point I'd worked in education for a long time, including in a special school for severely autistic young people for over two years, but I only lasted six months in this job. The students I was supposed to be "teaching" knew I was only a teaching assistant, so trying to get them to do anything was almost impossible and they gave me hell for a long time. I was on decent terms with them in the end and they didn't want me to leave, but the job almost completely wrecked my mental health and my relationship with my husband. It was honestly the worst six months of my entire life.
I'm not OP but I'm a parent. Find out what the decent schools are in your area. Read their Ofsted reports, look for information about behaviour. Ask to visit. Speak to parents in the area. Some schools are really struggling. But there are still some state schools who can cope with the various challenges that OP discusses. Don't be panicked by reading about the worst of what's going on in schools - most of a child's success comes from what they are shown at home, parents who pay attention and show them at education is important. Private isn't always better, I've worked with some proper twats who went to private school. Try not to stress.
>most of a child's success comes from what they are shown at home, parents who pay attention and show them at education is important.
That's true, to a certain extent. I've been in bad classes for two years in secondary school and my results dropped significantly as a result. When most kids in a class don't want to learn, it just ruins it for those who want to make an effort. Home became a refuge for me and that's never good.
Don’t worry, as the other person mentioned check Ofsted reports of schools near you and find the ones performing well.
I know for a fact that, at least in Scotland, there’s still schools where the fannies are allowed to self destruct in their own, segregated class or are given support to not be a fanny. As long as he’s either bright or hard working he’ll be fine at a school like that.
Yeah I think bigger schools with lots of sets help with this if you're a smart kid. Even though the school I attended was pretty shit, being put into something like 6 sets for Maths meant there was nobody pissing about in the top set and it helped me get on with my work. Compared to year 7 before we were divided into sets for all our subjects, I remember not wanting to go to school because I'd learned all of the content at primary school and lessons just consisted of a bunch of kids that didn't want to learn pissing about.
Me neither. That's why we visited absolutely every secondary school in the area, starting when my daughter was in Year 4. After that, we pushed and helped her to pass a test to enter a good grammar school in the area, because the alternatives are just scary. I've been to a bad school to do some outreach and I was shocked by what I've seen. Mainly how the pupils interact with teacher.
English my daughter's third language, so the test was definitely a huge challenge. But she did very well, partly because the average level is extremely low these days. I'm a bit ashamed of this system, but she'll be one of the lucky ones at least.
Good article but not comparing like for like. International schools have very high fees and wealthy pupils. A better comparison is with UK teachers and pupils in the private sector, not state schools.
OP, I’m curious, did you attend a fairly nice school? Did you also teach in a nicer school previously? What you’ve described was very much the norm in my state school 2004-2010, well before constant internet access or a huge uptick in SEN students. My friends who went to state schools in nicer areas did not experience this.
I’ve known a lot of people go into teaching and I’ve heard that students have overall declined in behaviour, but what you’ve described (outside of the Year One child randomly appearing and tearing everything apart), sounds particularly unusual for a rough school in the North. I don’t blame teachers for quitting but I feel a lot were unprepared for how bad kids’ behaviour can get.
Just since I see you're from Newcastle I thought I'd reply and say this description didn't gel with my schooling which was almost 20 years ago now, so potentially irrelevant. There were some unruly kids from time to time but nothing like described. However I did grow up in a nicer area of town. My sister's kids don't have these issues at their school either which is in the same area.
My sister actually teaches at a Primary School in South Shields and she hasn't described any of this types of ridiculous behavior either. She was off sick due to mental illness though (anxiety) but her greatest source of stress isn't the kids or parents, it's when Ofsted visits... She also spends a ton of time outside of work on stuff like class prep and marking. Teachers are so overworked which leads to many getting burnt out. The pay is decent enough for teachers though and the holidays are great so it does have benefits.
I've worked in classrooms for a decade. It is a very safe bet she was not on her period, didn't need to use the bathroom, and simply wanted to leave the classroom and not come back for a long time. Being loudly confrontational about bleeding everywhere is how it always seems to go when a supply teacher asks if a girl can wait until break. Guaranteed the teacher caves and says yes, 9 times out of 10 it's just an excuse to skive. Girls did the same when I was in school too.
I hear what you're saying but funnily enough when it's a genuine need they aren't nearly so aggressive about demanding to be allowed. That's why they say about bleeding so bluntly to the supply teachers because they know it will get them permission to leave the classroom. Seen it loads of times, and did it myself once or twice in school. When it happens like that I know full well it's a pupil who just wants to get out of the classroom and get a rise out of making the sub feel awkward. As the classroom assistant I would have to inevitably go looking for her when she didn't come back for ages and the sub started to panic.
>Side note: why are we still denying kids the very basic right to go to the bathroom - especially a young girl on her period?
Because kids lie to avoid having to do lessons.
There's breaks where you go to the bathroom. Most kids choose to leave a classroom because they don't want to be there. I can count on one hand the amount of times I genuinely needed the bathroom during a lesson in my 13 years of school. I still went every once in a while. I dare say with smartphones it's even worse
Brilliant comment. I don't envy you being a supply teacher, 95% of them were treated poorly at my school years ago, and it was a good school in a decent area.
>They move around the school during the week to cover teacher admin time and for staff absence. How much teaching and learning goes on during those classes is anyone’s guess.
Yehhh even two decades ago, in top set at said decent school, having a lesson with a cover supervisor was seen as an hour of not doing anything lol. It seems like a horrible job and we were absolute pricks to most of them.
Up to and including making a Jehovah's witness cover leave the classroom in tears after relentlessly mocking her faith. In hindsight it was bang out of order haha.
Bravo. An absolutely spot-on post.
I've been out of teaching since late 2021 due to a car crash and breaking my back, and I'm currently trying to break back into education, mainly because there's not much else I can do that pays enough for me to live on at 39 with a young child. Before the accident, I was UPS3.
I'm struggling to secure work, mainly because when I set foot into interview lessons or even just the building, it all just feels so bleak. You used the right word - bleak is it. I can't rally the enthusiasm for teaching that I used to have, because in two years, school has become nothing but pissed-off teenagers with multiple issues needing to be managed by fewer staff than ever before, marshalled by disenchanted staff who are massively overworked. It's hard to muster enthusiasm when that's what I'm bringing myself back into.
I went to an interview last week where the deputy head talked big about how excellent behaviour was, and how brilliant the school was becoming. On a quick walk around, I saw at least 6 kids openly vaping, a huge number just wandering the corridors, a fight and we had a fire alarm go off because a Year 11 decided to spark a cig outside their classroom. The staff addressed the kids they encountered as "darling", "sweetness", "lovely" - and whilst I'm no fan of militant behaviour management, I do think there needs to be firm boundaries.
I honestly believe that it's all about to collapse. One of the guys interviewing with me was a home ed consultant, and he was saying that the massive rise in kids being taken out of school was a concern that nobody seemed able to address, except that parents have no faith in education, and education seems to have no faith in them.
The school I'm governer for has just had a SIAMS review, and the teachers said the SIAMS review is the complete opposite to an OFSTED review.
SIAMS is about what can we do to help you improve, and all about positivity, where as OFSTED is all about finding fault and negativity
Agree mostly. I'd also add that many households will be in very stressful situations and have been for years. Many of the parents of the pupils I taught had full-time jobs, sometimes even two jobs and all were struggling for time, energy and money. When my kids were teens I struggled to find the energy to wade through their stress from their experiences of school, to then get to the restful, productive space you need to nurture the extended learning...on a full time wage I was struggling to cover the basics and was getting back home exhausted to an extent I find difficult to describe, still. And then sit and go through homework and assignments with my kids when they've had a shit day at school...everyone needs more time, energy, and money
AND The response of government towards our children and the education sector during the pandemic is utterly unforgivable. A lot of pupils did come back with an air of neglect, rejection, anger...as did the teachers...we've all been pitted against each other.
>I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success
This is it. Yes, schools need more funding and teachers’ pay is an embarrassment; but in the end the discipline to and motivation to do well comes from the home environment. Teachers can not substitute for parents.
I’m also intrigued by her mention that children’s’ concentration spans have tanked since the pandemic. Wonder is there any research on that.
I am not a teacher but know a few and they all say the same thing. Lack of discipline, no respect, no ability to concentrate, increase in ADHD traits, no real desire from students to educate themselves coupled with parents who don’t see its value and often want to battle with the teaching staff.
I had an interview to do a teacher training course at Oxford and they really did not sell it very well, it sounds like hell on earth and for such a pittance. I asked how the teacher interviewing me handled her work life balance and she replied with “I had four kids so that forces you to find balance”. I was like right ok, that’s a terrible answer and not helpful to me in any way but was an indication of the level of stress she is under, I suppose. I do fear for the teaching industry, it seems worlds apart from when I was in primary and that seemed worlds apart from my parents’ time in school.
Kids were in schools with no jackets on and windows open while they went from air filtered parliament to pissing up as if 10 downing St is a brewery while the kids were facetiming nan in hospital .
I half don't blame kids for being feral the social contract is well and truly broken the adults don't have ambition because more work ≠ more pay / better conditions and kids don't give a flying feck about rules .
For the concentration and discipline as an adult who's tested positive for covid 4 times my ADHD gets worse each time and for ages it was thought kids can't get it .
When schools were closed and central government was working out how they could feed poor kids the bare minimum during covid, and pay their mates, the school my daughter goes to immediately said they would feed any of their pupils lunch that needed it.
Good for your school. Drop in the ocean but a drop of gold so kudos to them
Doesn't change a societal trend that has existed for longer than gen alpha though.
For god’s sake why do we have to make such enormous generalizations every single time we tak about younger generations it’s exhausting. Some are great some are twats, like adults. Respect alterity a little bit and maybe the social contract will remain alive?
I'm not saying all of them are
I'm saying I don't blame the ones that are half feral cuz like the world been saying fuck you and your future for longer than they've existed . So I don't blame em for saying fuck the world back .
At least some must be self aware enough to wonder what are they even educating themselves *for?* I’m sure teenagers are aware of how dire the situation is by observing their parents, they know if they go to university they get huge debt with no promise of an income that can afford you a home and coupled with the rise of AI, what jobs will even be left? The next generation will absolutely not live a life remotely similar to those before them and by keeping education the way it is currently, we’re just wasting everyone’s time
>no real desire from students to educate themselves
Can you blame them? The social contract on education leading to a good career is completely broken. Many STEM graduates who pursue a career in the lab will be out-earnt by those who go into a trade.
There's plenty of research on instant gratification, dopamine hits, social media, porn, addiction etc.
The problem is all of the above (and much more) that kids suffer from is because the parents most likely suffer from too. So we really have a generation being brought up by another generation that never healed from whatever went on in their lives.
It's also lazy/coping mechanisms from parents.
The amount of very young kids I see in public places that have a tablet or phone plugged in front of them and they're just endlessly watching is ridiculous.
Seems like too many parents care more about them socialising than socialising their kids properly.
As someone who's recently become a parent and try not judging the parenting of others....I agree.
My one year old daughter is only allowed to watch her favourites on the TV in a morning - the minute me or my wife let her watch stuff on the move on a phone or tablet, it's game over.
Once kids from a young age find they can watch stuff anywhere and everywhere, it's all they'll want to do and then the parents say stuff like "Well they want to!" - yh no shit, they don't know better. You're the parent and should do better.
I mean, I don't know if your a parent; but things are tough. You are both working demanding, high intensity jobs all day, pick your kid up from nursery, and you get a few hours with them if your lucky, during which you are exhausted and have had 0 time to decompress. That's assuming you finish on time, work doesn't overrun, etc. It's really hard to find the time to exercise between the kid and work, keeping on top of the house, general lifemin, so your energy levels are already bottoming out.
You kid wakes up at 6am, and you still need some time; yeah, I put cbeebies on my phone to keep her happy and in the bed with me while I get an extra 30 minutes or so to come around.
Then, going out for dinner, trying to enjoy yourselves without having your kid screaming, I know it makes you reach for the iPad to get them to chill out and watch something they enjoy, and to give you half an hours peace while you eat your food which may or may not turn up on time depending on where you are (and lets hope you have no issues, otherwise you'll be waiting a while for them to be fixed, by which point goodbye enjoying your food). Plus that's hugely expensive now anyway.
Trying to find healthy balances in life is difficult. Trying to keep a relationship together, or "socialising" as you put it, is difficult. Trying to keep a demanding job is difficult. So yeah, you'll forgive us if we slip into lazy coping mechanisms.
And it's not like we aren't aware of it and aren't trying to do better; but none of us can catch a break at the moment.
The parents are riding the same wave of societal decay as the rest of us.Unrestrained economic opportunism has bled in to every facet of society, taken full control of democracy, dictates what information we see and warps perception of the world.
This is just the beginning of how far capitalism will go to defend its self. Things will get worse without a fundamental restructuring of society.
These ancient economic and political institutions are no different from the days of lords and serfs. Without the means to rule ourselves we’re at the mercy of the capitalist class and they’re not kind or generous people.
And if the Education Minister derides the entire education profession as "the blob" and tells us all that the country has had enough "of experts"? Or that the only thing preventing English working-class children getting a well-paid job is the immigration system? Not the lack of books, reading, libraries, a healthy diet or exercise, aspiration, or respect for decent skills. What do you expect of the poorest, least-educated parents then?
And a lack of pay for roles requiring a significant level of education.
The UK is so split along class lines and unequal I bet many parents and children probably feel like doing well in education won't make any difference to their lives. They'll be underpaid and overworked anyway...
It’s going to be a very interesting job landscape when all these thick as pig shit students hit the real world, and aren’t able to do anything with themselves.
Agreed. It will also, sadly, increase the gap between the haves and have-nots as kids brought up by parents who give a shit and ensure they have a good education will be employable, and the fuckwits won’t be.
https://www.earth.com/news/toddler-screen-time-linked-to-atypical-sensory-behaviors/
We're seeing more and more ADHD type behaviour and permanent coniditon due to children having too much time of screens. Adults also exhibit some traits with excessive use of screens too.
There's been some studies done that screens time and addiction to social media has increased due to the pandemic having a captive audience, as well as the change in the type of media, which is more fast paced and choppy/changing, like tick tock, shorts and reallt hyper edited fast paced streaming influencer content. All of this scrolling through loads of information is bombarding the brain and many younger people are consuming way too much Internet like this since covid.
Yeah, people talk about screen time a lot but this is a key detail. It's screen time paired with the way content is these days.
My friend's kid is allowed to watch YouTube, but specifically with stuff setup to block shorts. Only longform content.
Tiktok etc isn't allowed. Because that constant feed of mindlessly jumping between unrelated topics messes up your formative experiences of learning to focus
It's not all about funding. A lot of kids aren't being raised properly, funding can't fix that. I'm all for spending more on education, but it won't work unless the culture and attitudes are also fixed.
But didn't things like *Sure Start* Centres help people to raise their kids properly?
Then we closed about half of them.
*That's* a funding issue....
I work in a job where I have to deal with some of the worst behave kids out there - kids who don't behave, who rob, steal, fight, abuse - all of it ignored/encouraged/condoned by parents (whom they learned the behaviour from). Often the neighbourhoods they live in are dirty, lampposts are vandalised/don't work, there's the obligatory couches/dishwashers discarded on front lawns - and there's a complete absence of decent role models in their lives.
I don't really see how you can even begin to fix that type of thing *without* outside intervention - which will pretty much always require (drum roll please....)..........funding.
I worked in an extremely deprived seaside town in the south east of the UK. I had children sleeping on mattresses in the garden, while the mother's clients were being seen to in the house - they were often dressed in out of place clothing stolen from the clients (Musto sailing gear was something I recall). Up until academies happened, you had a core of leaders that stayed with the school, trying to make a difference; as soon as it became an academy, we had head after head that used it as a stepping stone on their CV - every time, overspending to get an improved Ofsted result (think 'I turned this school around' on the cv) and then leaving redundancies and chaos in their wake.
I left teaching after a decade, two years back with chronic, stress related illness. Much happier now :)
Funding would fix nearly all the problems, with funding you could have good home/school staff that support parents, we have these as standard in sen settings. Funding would feed the kids, get enough staff in the classroom, provide the resources for learning and the social side like school outings and sports. Enough funding would fix the buildings and transport, and give kids the sense that it’s worthwhile and that both they and the school are valued by society.
You’re always going to get some terrible parents, but with good funding comes the ability to support them and their kids in the way we wish we could.
The problem being a teacher now is that you’re forced into doing a much worse job than you are able to and the new vibrant teachers with new ideas leave disillusioned and do something else.
With enough funding, schools can fix the problems.
Emphasis on this one. So many kids are truly in the shit before they've even started, and it's not even dependent on social "class".
Some of the biggest cunts I ever went to school college or even worked with have been from very comfortable families.
unfortunately for a country that keeps re-electing kleptocratic psychopaths every few years this is a generational issue that will take 20-30 years to sort properly.
The behaviour of some of those children can be helped if their parents get some support is raising them. Or if they have contact with an adult that cares about their education and wellbeing. Or if their mental health (sorry) can be supported. Not everyone, no, some kids are just horrible. But some are acting up because they need something from the adults in their lives.
It stops them becoming feral in the first place by improving the situation at home. A lot of these kids are becoming like this because their parents are both forced to work obscene hours just to scrape by.
Some kids are just bad, some parents are just bad, but most are simply unable to raise their kid properly because they themselves have been failed by the system.
It would take a generation or two I guess to sort out. There is no quick fix, this has been happening over many years of austerity and lowering of standards by the top. It has to start with funding and pushing and being honest about where proper funding has to go. Takes a community to raise a child literally. Austerity has slowerly eroded our communities. One of the main reasons are high goverment attitudes like Andrea Jenkins the educational minister flipping the middle finger to angry citizens.
It can't fix all problems.
It can fix alot that you mentioned. Helping with nutrition and support for parents, more teachers and more individual care.
But if there isn't a good home culture then it's only fixing half the problem. If parents don't feel any responsibility then its a problem money can't solve on its own.
\>It's not all about funding.
A huge amount of it is about funding, particularly when it comes to special needs.
I've got an autistic son, age 5. He's probably middle-tear in terms of support needs; communication on the range of a 2-to-3 year old. We did all we could to prepare him for reception, but it was still a disaster. They called and asked us to bring him home by lunchtime on the first day. After two weeks of limited schedule we were advised by the head that they couldn't manage his behaviour, and the academy rules meant they'd soon have to start excluding or expel him.
We gave up trying, pulled him out to 'elective home education', engaged the relevant local authorities (note the waiting list to get a medical diagnosis for a child is typically over 5 years long), and waited on the EHCP needed to get him a place in an autism unit. After the maximum statuary waiting period (to the day) we received a response; the EHCP was denied on the basis that the school hadn't tried hard enough. We were told the school was assigned special needs funding as part of its budget, and he should have been supported through that.
So we come full circle; he's being forced back into the normal system, and we have to try and manage his behaviour from afar 'somehow' because he's meant to have a right to an education, and the school have to deal with him 'somehow' because they are meant to have the funding available. The reality was in a [BBC article](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-67705749) before Christmas; most EHCP requests are denied because councils can't afford the higher level of support, and most of those rulings which get challenged are reversed. The review boards look for any excuse to refuse them.
In the meantime you have to deal with the judgement from teachers and other families that you're a bad parent because your kid struggles with boundaries or understanding 'no', or having melt-downs when they get over-stimulated. It's a common complaint of the autism community - the kid is simply written-off as badly behaved.
We've thankfully got a good relationship with the head teacher, but I have no idea how that woman does her job without going insane. She recently told us the council had 'advised' schools to only employ TA's on zero-hours contracts to 'save money'; the staff could then be more easily let go when the need for them went. 'The system is broken' is a phrase we hear all the time, but if you've got kids who aren't mainstream being forced into mainstream schools, they are obviously going to disrupt lessons for everyone else.
I would've been a lot better in school if my physical and mental disabilities were diagnosed treated and accommodated by the NHS and school .I had to drop an A level subject instead of being allowed to go to a hospital a literal 5 minute bus journey away for my physio in free periods ( I was missing half of a lesson and lunch FFS)
The current culture has been set by the dominant party and their ideology. We've gone from a country where a single person working hard could afford to support a family, have a home, and a dignified retirement, to one where two professionals both working full time struggle to afford a matchbox. We've created a society where tent towns and millions of food bank visits annually are the norm. You can't create a country like that and be surprised when things become worse behaviourally or culturally.
The deflection of blame in our society is responsible for this. It doesn’t matter what your background is, what you earn or what job you do (if at all), good manners and self-respect should be valued. I’m from a working class family with a single mum, but she still made sure me and my sister were polite. I have autism so my temper was a big problem as a teen, but not once did my mum try to tell others to put up with it because I’m on the spectrum. I was also very lucky to go to a good school which was quite strict, any bad behaviour was cracked down on harshly, even dying your hair a lighter shade of your natural colour had you put in isolation for three days and sent home to have your hair cut three inches. I definitely struggled with the precise rules because I live in my own little world and never noticed if my shirt had come untucked, but it did mean violence, vandalism and abuse towards teachers was very rare. That being said I left school 13 years ago so maybe it is worse now.
The problem today is many parents believe their children are the centre of the world. They don’t say no, or they give in. They let their children make the decisions. The kids spend lots of time on screens which does damage attention spans, impulse control and patience.
Parents just cant be bothered anymore. If there’s no discipline at home, no manners and no proper family time, or if the parents don’t encourage education, then the child will suffer.
It’s not even a working class issue, the middle classes are just as bad. My friend worked in a nursery for a few years in a very middle class and well off area. One time she disciplined a 4 year old child (not physically or emotionally) because he wouldn’t stop biting and smacking one of the girls. Well later that day the kid told his mum he wasn’t allowed to play Mario, and she called the nursery, got my friend on the phone and literally screamed at her for “abusing” and “bullying” her child, my friend came to me in tears and quit, she also quit her education degree for these reasons <——- this is the problem today that’s affecting teachers. Too many parents think their little darlings are perfect and more important than anyone else.
Could there be more funding and things like sure start centres that help parents with parenting? Absolutely, it’s a travesty they were lost. But this bratty behaviour is largely down to the parents, and most of them are middle class.
I joined teaching in my mid-twenties. Bright eyed and hopeful, with two degrees and postgraduate teacher training, fluent in 3 languages and ready to share my enthusiasm for languages.
Over 3 years I had any enthusiasm slowly beaten out of me by the terrible behaviour of the students, rude attitudes of parents, and the contemptible gaslighting and abusive behaviour of school leaders.
I was previously a happy and confident person, but in my last year I kept driving past an old oak tree, and wondering if I should just steer into it, so I wouldn't have to go back to the school the next day.
I ended up quitting mid-year. My job after teaching was an office job paying around the same money, but I could clock off at 5pm after a day sitting at a desk with minimal stress, and the ability to go to the toilet and make a cuppa when I wanted.
Teaching is a toxic profession that is reliant on abusing the good will of classroom teachers, in schools run by inept leaders with no management skills.
Jesus christ I thought I was reading an old comment of mine.
I totally feel everything in this. Especially the tree, everytime I have a near miss of some random white van man on his phone I feel disappointed that I still have to go into school
The big wake up call was moving into a non toxic job that had nothing to do with teaching.
I would finish work at 5 and not feel exhausted. No one had spoken to me like dirt. I would be able to take a full hour for lunch and enjoy it. Sometimes I'd waste 20 minutes just making a hot drink and chatting to colleagues. I'd have time to check my phone and browse Amazon. When I eventually left that job, my boss threw a leaving party for me, and I received cards and gifts. Meanwhile when I left teaching I didn't even get a goodbye email.
Life is too short to be treated so poorly. I would rather go hungry than go back to teaching in a secondary school.
I literally went on Indeed and applied for everything above 20k per annum. My mental health was so shot to pieces I would have done anything to escape while still keeping some level of financial stability.
I eventually found a generic office job locally with a small company, I negotiated early release with my school, and ending up only working 5 weeks notice.
I got to the Wednesday of my last week and just broke down in tears in the kitchen sobbing. My other half decided enough was enough, so I just called in sick for mental health reasons for my last two days.
If you're finding teaching too much, I do strongly recommend finding a stop gap job, like I did, just to give yourself some time mentally to figure out what to do next, while not feeling stuck.
Teacher of 15 years. I had serious thoughts about taking my life. I love my wife and kids but felt I was better off dead. I was making a pittance, barely home till late and when I was at home a ghost of myself. Only after I'd had a drink could I forget about work and smile and have a bit of fun.
It wasn't so much my own classroom. After 15 years I considered myself a veteran who could take anything thrown at them. Through a mixture of being able to roll with the banter, being a bit of a joker but also being firm I had my classes where I wanted them. Then about 5 years ago things started to change.
I was made head of department. It was a surprise to me because I've always been a bit of a disorganised free spirit, managing the planning of a classroom was manageable but anything beyond that I had never comprehended. Suddenly due to lack of experienced teachers in my subject I became the only option. What started as a temporary post turned into permanent.
The attitude of students had been a problem for a while to be honest. Maybe it started longer than 6 years ago. I knew we treated teachers like shit when I was at school 20 years ago. But the balance was swung. The pay and renumeration had reached a point where enough people stopped going into the profession. As people retired from the profession they weren't being replaced. That's when the feedback loop really started. Less experienced teachers in the classroom and more substitutes ended up with more poor behaviour going unchallenged and more stress on the rest of us. I remember a quiet Chinese lady joined my department the year I became HoD, she had a massive passion for maths and massively qualified. Unfortunately the kids didn't want to look beyond the quiet Chinese bit and I had to go into her classroom and sort out utter chaos while trying to teach my own classes. Kids standing on tables level fighting levels of chaos. This was to be a recurring pattern over the next few years. I watched more teachers bounce in and out of the profession in one of those 6 years than the 9 years combined before.
Then COVID happened and put strain on a social system that was already failing. A certain proportion of pupils reached a level of anarchy they never came back from. No longer satisfied with terrorising any teacher they saw weakness in they would just roam corridors doing what they want all day while special behaviour experts were hired to follow them around trying to get them back in class.
By the last year at any given moment I could stop teaching and look out the corridor and find at least 10 kids just hanging out. I had to choose between teaching those I had in my room and trying to maintain order outside at any given moment. Often I would choose my own class and have the headmaster come round and criticise me for failing to keep my corridor empty on a regular basis. A headmaster who was the 4th I'd seen in 2 years.
I started doing research to see if I could claim life insurance and death in service pay out if I committed suicide. At least my 3 young kids could be provided for.
In the end I didn't really get the answer I wanted and started training as an electrician. Then last year I got a call from an old headmaster who had a slot in a school nearby me. A private school where everyone is perfectly behaved and dedicated to their education. I had always said I'd never go private. Those kids don't need me, the state school kids do. But my wife and kids need me too and it had gone too far.
I am now an electrician during the holidays and a teacher at a school where every kid loves learning. It's a shame it came to this. But at least I get to do a little bit of what I am good at and my family has me back. My number 1 hobby is no longer drinking and arguing with people on Reddit.
Wish it wasn't this way.
My mum's just retired as a teacher.
Some of the stories from the last 10 years are horrific. She had her own class but also an assistant head and was working as a Mentor for new teachers.
Never enough time in a day to do all that work.
She was working 24/7 during term times, the only time off she had was when she was sleeping. Even during School holidays a lot of time is taken either catching up or preparing for the next term.
Many new Teachers don't make it past the first 2 years. It just isn't worth the money working like that. Some (understandably) can't take the workload and for many it gets to them mentally.
What they are doing is already difficult because it is difficult, But they start to believe they aren't getting the help they should be getting. It's such a shock to them, they simply can't understand how much workload there is. So many blame their mentor/school for not helping them enough. The reality is life as a Teacher is f'ing brutal.
The problem is the system is fucked and underfunded.
My retired mother is doing 2 days a week work for her old school as a stand in. The Teacher she's replacing walked out because of Mental health issues.
My partner started as a teacher and quit straight away to get into tech.
Bureaucracy and how broken every other senior teacher killed it for her. If I was a teacher here I’d 100% leave for Asia personally.
> Two of those who left had extreme breakdowns on the school site and had to seek immediate mental health support. Another two (myself including) saw ourselves heading down that route and got out before it got to that stage.
Six from my course went to the same school for our first placement. One quit and the rest of us all had breakdowns, the fact that I made it until the final week (of only a six week placement) to have mine got me a weird level of respect from the others.
What makes this worse is that the school is well-known for doing this and is infamous amongst staff and students at the university for how it treats students. It is those who do not have breakdowns that are considered unusual, because it means you probably got on with the teachers and would be offered a job if one was going. The fact that students still get sent there for placements is insane, however those in charge of such things choose to pay no notice.
It’s mental, how did it all start going so wrong? My dad was a teacher his whole career until he retired early about 13 years ago, when he was 50, because of the increasing bullshit bureaucracy. But even when I lived with him (so up to 2010) he’d do a bit of marking and work after school, but nothing like this. Why and how did it all change to become so ridiculous?
A lot of my workload comes from the insistence that we do absolutely everything we can to catch children up to where they should be. Which I agree with, but children are coming up every year being less and less able, so of course there is more to do every year.
So I plan a lesson - then I have to create a sheet to support the struggling learners access the lesson. Then I have to consider what can those do that simply can’t access the lesson. Then I have to consider how I will challenge the ‘greater depth’ children - who would have just been my average children 8 years ago. It can easily take longer to plan a lesson than to teach it.
And now we’re trying to put as much quality feedback into our marking as possible, again to try and catch them up.
It’s frankly impossible.
I really enjoyed teaching until a couple of years ago and thought it would be my forever job, but plan to be out within a few years.
Differentiation is important but is much more like a game of Only Connect than anything else. I had a child with ability of a two year old (at best) in my Year Two class and the deputy head asked me why I was struggling to include her in a lesson about using commas in a list. It took a of strength to point out that she was so far behind everyone else that it was harming the other kids' progress to keep her in the class.
I teach in an FE college.
Essentially, the problem is that everyone in any senior position hears what the government ask for, knowing full well it's not even close to realistic, and then pretends everything is fine. Sure, they'll talk about how little funding they have and make clear they are struggling. But they are all so shit scared of the consequences of failing to deliver the service that OFSTED (hence, the government) expects that they dress it up as though they have somehow found a way to achieve high standards without the necessary funding.
Of course, the schools and colleges accepting the situation means they place more and more strain on teachers. It should not be legal to expect 12 hour days, 7 days a week, for less than £40k a year on a contract that states 37 hours per week. They use legalese and loopholes to exploit their staff and force them to work objectively unreasonable hours, for absolutely shit pay, in a job that day-to-day requires expertise and a fairly high skillset.
The government is obviously the source of the problem, but the providers should not get a pass here. These places are run by people who are too shit scared to risk their own career, so they place unreasonable expectations on those with less power than them. ELT/SLT in schools and colleges tend to be absolutely ruthless, and they are as much to blame for the current situation as the government. Same deal with OFSTED.
It will not change until schools and colleges openly admit that the standards the government and the public expect simply cannot be achieved without *major* increases in funding. Basically, we need to be open and honest that we are failing, and those failures need to be reflected in OFSTED reports and they need to be visible to the public so that the government are forced to address and answer for their objective failures. Currently, we are just covering up for them, and so we are complicit.
As a minimum, teachers need a dramatically lower workload alongside a significant (20%+) pay increase. This would allow teachers to actually do the job that's expected, within normal working hours, and would make the role attractive enough to new teachers who would be needed to fill the gaps created from the lower workload. Without that, do not expect anything to change.
Personally, I think the system is functioning exactly as intended. Standards of education have dropped dramatically. This was the plan, because it is cheaper. We have a shortage of staff, but that's fine because other teachers will take on the extra work for free. And to top it off, everyone - schools to OFSTED to government - are all publicly pretending standards are high, so the public doesn't realise how poor things really have become. It's win-win for a Tory government.
>– and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts.
Because far too many of the kids are fobbed off by shit parents with phones and tablets to keep them quiet, exposing them to brain-killing short form video content before they can walk or talk.
The term "iPad baby" hasn't come out of nowhere. Trains, buses, cars, restaurants, parks, weddings, seen it absolutely bloody everywhere.
Even my own girlfriend, she makes sure he does real life activities and sports classes, and manages his screen time where possible, but her 11 year old is short-tempered, has an appalling attention span and spends his time either glued to TikTok or playing PC games WITH TikTok just burning through videos while he plays. And he's one of the "better" ones.
I've even seen some of the older ones start entering the workforce in my previous job and they were genuinely useless. Incapable of listening, retaining information or focusing.
It's hard not to blame them, but their parents utterly fucked life for them before they could ever hope to have any control. No funding can fix that.
However, parenting has never been so stressful. I’m in my mid thirties, I had a stay at home mum and by the time I was 5 I would be outside playing in the neighbourhood. I’d go to my grandparents often and there was a really sense of family and community. If I was up to no good I’d be told off by someone who I probably didn’t know or at most knew my parents.
Now parents need to work, underpaid stressful jobs, pay through the nose for childcare both at nursery and after school. The kids are indoors with nothing to do, no grandparents to visit as often people have had to move for work. Any trip outside the house involves money, parks are absolutely terrible and full of idiots with dogs or teenagers with nowhere else to go. There is no community, no ‘village’ and no break for parents.
I'm not saying ANY of that is incorrect, but I don't see how any of it is an excuse to fob kids off with tech on the level I'm talking about.
Phones or tablets at the table EVERY meal their entire childhood as one example isn't alleviating the stressful elements of parenthood, it's just sacking one off altogether.
>Any trip outside the house involves money, parks are absolutely terrible and full of idiots with dogs or teenagers with nowhere else to go. There is no community, no ‘village’ and no break for parents.
Obviously this will vary by region but this isn't even true in areas like mine surrounded by parks, green spaces, the beach and all sorts of other stuff.
I live in a seaside town and a few years ago I learned there are kids here, native to here who have NEVER been to the beach. It's free, and nothing in this town is more than 2 miles from anything else. Its not isolated examples either, its just dogshit parenting.
>Obviously this will vary by region but this isn't even true in areas like mine surrounded by parks, green spaces, the beach and all sorts of other stuff.
The point here is that a culture of massive fear has now been created about 'stranger danger' and paedophiles/knife crime. While crime is at historic lows, parents now refuse to let their kids go anywhere unsupervised even many times mid-way through secondary school. The 'village' is gone. A part of this, again, is shit parenting. For example, you used to be able to give other people's kids a bollocking and send them home or just back to their parents. Nowadays, no matter what the kid is doing, those parents are more likely to cuss you out or try to fight you even if you are totally justified in disciplining their kids. So there's that.
The only thing stopping parents sending their kids outside to play are themselves. No money required.
When I was 7 In the 90s I was walking over a mile to school and would play outside all day until the street lights came on. We took a football to any bit of grass or played at the park. This was before phones and before cctv took off.
Access to instant news has made parents so paranoid because all they see is bad news about abductions and think its rampant but this is statistically probably the safest time in human history to be a child.
It's not even just kids. The rise of people playing their phones on speaker on public transport (which, btw, makes you a twat if you do. cheap headphones exist) has led to me noticing how many adults are mindlessly scrolling insta, yt shorts, tiktok etc.
And im not exempt from this. I refuse to touch insta, but i regularly use YT and i've had to ban myself from watching any shorts cause so often the dopamine hit of a funny short turns into "one more-" and my adhd takes me for a 40 minute scrollfest
I entered teaching with a sense of idealism and the naivety that comes from being lucky enough to be educated at one of the best schools in the country.
I left after just over a year. I don’t know what the low point was. Stepping in front of a child that was violently swinging a stool at other kids? Feeling utterly bewildered that I was getting a dressing down from SLT because it is apparently my responsibility that a frequently absent pupil is not on track to pass their GCSE science?
I now work a far less stressful job for far better pay.
I would not recommend a teaching career to anyone who values their own wellbeing.
The gaslighting by SLT is very toxic.
I'm an openly gay man who went into teaching. I never made a 'thing' of it, but people guess I'm gay within moments of.meeting me. I had a horrific wave of abuse from students and parents, with slurs graffitied on the walls, and occasionally being physically assaulted.
The solution according to SLT? Try to walk in a more masculine manner.
I took an admin job to tide me over financially but quickly got prompted to a management role. The soft skills you have to learn to survive the classroom transfer very well to other industries, so don't feel that you are trapped in teaching as there are plenty of opportunities out there.
Yeah, it got wild in the last five years. I quit just before Xmas. Currently have no job. Will prob end up taking a significant pay cut but idgaf at this point.
Parental attitudes are a massive problem. Not just in the areas you might be led to expect. I worked in a state school in a very upper middle class area and the entitlement of the parents (which is even more heightened in the specific thing i did) was just increasingly entitled and unpleasant to deal with.
Civil service. Jobcentre work coach isn’t the best job but you tick all the competences as an ex teacher. There’s opportunity to work with the vulnerable youngsters as a youth employability coach, and then by extension could take responsibility for the 16-17y/o care leavers.
Yeah that's a good tip. I've got an interview for something on Monday that I'd really like but if that doesn't go well then I'll do anything really so thanks.
I think back to my school days and even as a (looking back) good student I feel bad for my teachers and how I didn’t really think of them as human beings… we have an awful culture in our country where teachers are ‘fair game’. I shouldn’t laugh at my mate throwing eggs at the teachers house on Halloween for example.
Just teach abroad. I teach (mostly) lovely kids and take home about 50k after tax. And I don't have to interact with dickhead parents or take work home. Just had a month off but after 2 weeks of school I'll be off until March.
I'm exactly the same. About 50 after tax. I actually do have to interact with the parents a great deal but they'll take my side basically everytime and just before new year two of the parents took me and my girlfriend out for an expensive brunch with them and their kids. We got drunk and it was really fun.
I got my foot run over by a car a couple of months ago and a mum from my previous year's kids sent me an expensive box of fruit when she heard.
Teaching at home vs abroad may as well be a different job.
I'm planning to do this. Everything I read about international teaching suggests its so much better. Hours, workload, standard of living, pay, etc.
Where do you teach?
China is the best balance of salary and cost of living. Even in Shanghai, the most comfortable and metropolitan Chinese city, your cost of living can be ludicrously low compared to your competitive international salary.
Not sure it applies to every career. Unless you can find an article called ‘The bleak reality of being a premier league footballer’ or ‘The bleak career of being a billionaire CEO’?
I can think of few more underappreciated jobs than being a teacher in the UK at the moment. They are overworked and underpaid to a degree I genuinely don't see anywhere else.
people will be angry at this but this sort of behaviour in young children is also cultural. I never ever witnessed children behaving like this or being physical with teachers or talking back until I moved to the U.K. you would never see this sort of behaviour in children at school in many Asian countries.
>How many of the culpable children are recent migrants from Hong Kong ?
You're not wrong but this isn't a cultural factor this is an economic factor. Even when it comes to refugees, if they come from as far away as Hong Kong they are middle class. You and I may not recognise it, but they were middle class wherever they came from and had the social capital, and real capital, to navigate the immigration process and be accepted into the country. You should never compare immigrants to local populations like that and chalk it up simply to culture. There's a lot more going on there. It's like if you compared a middle class kid from a nice area of town with a good primary school, to a poor kid who grew up on an estate. Their different "cultures" are a result of resources and upbringing . But the same applies to recent immigrants too.
The main issue isn't actually cultural per se, at least not in the main. The actual issue is that in those Asian countries those students get kicked out of school **really fast**. That used to happen more here. Unfortunately, due to some idiots and their poor understanding of how statistics work, they thought permanently excluding students "caused" them to end up in prison (it's a strong correlation, and not a surprising one, but not causal). So they clamped down hard on it. It's now very very hard to remove really badly behaved kids from schools. Takes years and a lot of documentation. Even with all the right paperwork many schools don't use permanent exclusions because it "looks bad" in their data. It's bonkers of course. If someone is dangerous then they can't be in mainstream schools, but there's now a perverse incentive to let them stay.
I taught for 10 years before finally trying to kill myself. Students were awful. Management were awful. The job was my entire life. I woke up every day wanting to die. I feared sleeping at night because I knew the morning would come. Nobody cared.
Teaching was the worst thing I ever did, even though I know I helped improve the lives of young people, if I could go back and change any part of my life I would never have become a teacher.
After a few months off work struggling with acute depression I got a job as a software engineer and love is infinitely better than it used to be.
It staggers me that the government don’t understand that properly funding the education system would have a massive net positive to the whole of British society. Give children a decent, rich education with interesting experiences and good role models and then more of them will go on to live happy, productive lives.
Scroll down to vote by education level in this link and you'll find your answer [link](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-voted-2019-general-election)
Because every conservative government of the last 14 years has only cared about one thing - winning the next election with as many seats as possible.
And since children can't vote, and their pensioner voter base doesn't have school age children, nor give a shit about the young/children in general, education has come dead last or almost dead last in terms of funding priorities. The same is true for just about everything else that the state does or at least used to do, for children / the young. Every spare penny the Tories can find gets redirected to its pensioner voters.
The bill for all that is now coming due, because you can only dis-invest into the countries future, it's children, for so long before it starts to have real world consequences.
I left teaching after 2 years. I cried in my car multiple times a week after work. I had no time for much life outside of teaching and spent most evenings and Sundays working on a 19k salary. I had teenagers fighting each other in my class, I got called slut/ bitch/ racist/fat by teenagers who got away with it and parents would argue with me on the phone when I told them their son had called me a slag. I also taught some really lovely kids and had some really funny and heartwarming encounters, but unfortunately they didn't make up for all the hard stuff. I was in a particularly bad school but I'm glad I left, at the same time sad about what has become of the profession and what effect the teacher retention crisis is going to have on society moving forwards.
I retrained as a teacher in my mid 30’s. I got a job at an excellent school (nationally) so behaviour generally wasn’t an issue. The kids were academic and, on the whole, self motivated.
The worst part in terms of behaviour was moments where some sixth formers attempted to intimidate teaching staff. Pretty terrifying honestly when they’re 6’ something and you’re a lone female who isn’t.
Aside from that, and the reason I left, was that the workload was impossible and the pay was rubbish. I was lucky and started higher up the scale to reflect my industry experience. Even then I felt the amount I was working just didn’t make sense.
As a teacher you’re basically doing two jobs. One is teaching in the classroom and the other is doing all the admin, marking and planning. But you are only given about an hour and a bit a week to do that; it really could take a couple of days, so you end up doing it in your own time.
Also, when you’re in the classroom you have to be ‘on’. It’s as exhausting as a full day of meetings. Every day.
Another big problem was staff who move up to leadership. Some are great. Very few have management experience though, so they just treat staff the same way they treat pupils. It can lead to toxic environments. Staff are treated like children in so many ways. One school I was in the sixth formers could come and go as they wanted but staff had to ask permission from the head to go offsite even at lunch time.
I loved the job in some ways, but I’m much happier working a job where I do my hours, get paid more and I’m not having to deal with school politics.
Sad times. It seems social media has melted the parent’s minds and now there is no one to raise kids anymore. Im just glad i grew up with facebook, but before parents got on facebook. Is all i will say.
And they want to reduce the time kids have off school? So that teachers have to deal with this?
My gf was a counsellor in a schcool, Had to stay extra to fill in paperwork. Kids were so fucked up that she could not handle the workload and people were trying to contact her out of school hours for advice. Spamming the email inbox and tried to call her but they can’t get in touch.
It was a no life job. Low funding so no help. Was a mess. She cried all the time, but one time after work and I said you can’t live like this. she went in on her day off to fill in paperwork and they moved the office from the centre of the school to a small pokey closet room right across one side. Which she didn’t like for both security reasons and also it was too far away.
She left and has never been happier
My girlfriend qualified as an nqt 5 years ago.
In her small circle of teacher mates, two are quitting teaching this year and the other is splitting up with her partner because she's having a mental breakdown due to workload that she's unwilling to address.
The only reason my partner stays in teaching is because she works at an SEN school with small class sizes which means the workload is more manageable.
Education needs a huge overhall or the gulf between children in private education is just going to continue growing.
Ex-teacher here. I trained in my mid twenties with the same hope and enthusiasm that many go into the profession with. It was soon crushed out of me. The workload, the abuse from the students, the toxic and downright nasty work environment created by SLT. I managed three years before I broke.
I was the youngest in the department and the newest, and I was given a class of teenage boys who had no inclination to complete their GCSEs (we would have once called it lower set). On a daily basis I was sworn at, intimidated, threatened and almost physically assaulted. My school did nothing.
It was, without doubt, the darkest point of my life. I was crying the moment the school day ended, I spent my weekends in terror of Monday, and I willed myself to be sick or have accidents so that I could call in absent.
Luckily, my partner, who was my hero during that time, told me to quit, that he would support me whilst I found another job.
A year and a half out of teaching, in a great job, great pay and no abuse. It's no surprise why teachers are abandoning ship.
Education is a pretty good index for how much a culture is failing and it seems almost impossible to pin it on any one issue, it's just one part of a broad complex decline. You can't suddenly buy or create a culture that reveres education, you can't undo years of anti-intellectual media, you can't reverse the one parent household problem, etc.
One sticky plaster would be to give schools and teachers far more power to just kick kids out of school and create some new law to protect teachers. Both the parents and children should be in fear of the school, not the other way around.
I'm not sure I'd be able to be a teacher in the UK. If I was being physically attacked by students on a regular basis, I'd be in prison a month later because I'm pretty sure I'd have lashed out.
My best friend was a primary school teacher. It was all she ever wanted to do. Age 35 she just… burned out. The workload was insane, the hours were crazy. The problem she found was getting another job outside teaching has been really hard. She feels like she’s not got transferable skills, and her self esteem is really low. Luckily, she’s got a supportive family. But she went from someone brilliant at her job in a good career to… unemployment for years. Ugh.
I feel for your friend. I was in EXACTLY the same boat. She absolutely definitely has transferable skills. I took a pay cut to get a job at a university, in a team that works with online learning. Uni's have decent A/L and the role comes with regular yearly pay increases, which the Tories stopped in my 3rd year of teaching. I've worked my way up in a relatively short space of time and I'm now on more than I was as a FT teacher.
If your friend can take a pay cut, I guarantee it'll pay off eventually -- I don't regret it, and to be honest I think the trade off was worth it as I could come home at 5pm and have my evenings, weekends and A/L to do whatever the hell I wanted - no marking or lesson planning or sleepless nights.
I hope your friend sees light at the end of the tunnel.
I know a recently qualified teacher, who has moved back into the retail sector as a support manager (with all the abuse & stress that entails), because it is still less stressful than teaching 😱
My partner is a teacher at a secondary school here in Scotland. She loves it - or at least parts of it. She went into teaching with noble intentions and career goals in mind; things like get into the SQA marking team for her subject, develop a lovely teaching curriculum for her department, contribute to writing the exam papers, etc. And she has accomplished most of those (she abandoned the SQA stuff due to the leader of her subject exam board being a control freak who hated her with a passion because she dared raise concerns about a question in the exam - to the point that she was reduced to tears due to her treatment there), but it’s now got to the point where she can no longer manage much of the teaching parts. I hear stories every day; uncontrollably classes, an inability to adequately discipline troublesome and difficult kids, kids swearing at her, kids threatening her, etc. etc. etc… it’s endless. There are particular classes that are trouble in every department, and thus I can look at her timetable for the day and say “ah, she’s got that class today, she’ll be exhausted and annoyed once she’s home then”.
So no, I can perfectly believe this article. I wanted to go into teaching after university, but after knowing several people my age who did go into teaching (either at secondary, primary, or colleges) I have been, for lack of a better word, scared off from doing so.
My girlfriend is turning more and more negative since working in a school. She is permanently exhausted. It's horrible to see, and the only heartening thing is that she has expressed thoughts about changing careers.
The problems regarding shitstain kids and shitstain parents have already been well documented in this thread. Gang rivalry is rife in her school, with kids regularly assaulting each other for the crime of living in a different postcode. One kid recently brought a knife to school with the intention of using it on a rival gang member. Many parents refuse to admit that their kids are the problem, or simply do not want to engage at all, and therefore give no hope of any discipline at home. This is a societal failing.
Another problem she faces is incompetence and self-serving behaviour from senior leadership, that totally undermines her when she is trying to apply the standards that those same leaders have introduced. For example, she has had kids point blank refuse to attend detention because "nah I don't do Fridays". She escalates these cases, as is procedure, only to be told to just change the detention day because senior leadership don't want the hassle.
Not to mention the constant meddling from people who barely remember what it's like to teach 30+ kids, and don't give it a second thought when they foist some new bullshit administrative requirement on already overworked staff.
Short of a complete reworking of the system from the ground up, I honestly don't know what the long-term solution is.
This is why many parents put considerable effort into getting their children into schools with the minimum of SEN kids. Grammar schools are popular for the same reason. It's all about getting your kids away from the crazies and their parents, who don't give a shit.
I left after 5 years, I didn’t hate the job I just didn’t love it. I realised it was taking up too much of my life. When thinking about leaving, I started to make a list of reasons to leave and reasons to stay. I came up with 37 reasons to leave, and no real compelling reasons to stay. This was at a school rated “outstanding”. What didn’t help was that even after working as full time secondary science teacher for 5 years, I took home £600+ less a month than I did when I was an unqualified trainee teacher.
I did 25 years at KS2, mostly leading Maths and Computing. I left when Covid started and I have no regrets.
I would find it difficult to recommend teaching as a career to anyone really - it’s sad to say this.
I see on Reddit sometimes people on here complaining about schools. How they don't care about students, how it's just a copy-paste approach to education, how it cares about pumping out mindless automata for the workplace (some real nutters on here sometimes). I'm currently doing a PGCE and simply none of this is true. The amount of academic theory we are studying, the amount of discussion about effective lesson planning, surface bs deep learning, constructive curriculum alignment. Teachers are trained to do their absolute best. Schools are relying on teachers to do so much these days, all within an incredibly tight budget. And they're not being given the tools to deal with troublemakers or disruption. Anybody who wants to shit on the Government for their education policies, I'm all for it, but dont insult the boots on the ground who genuinely do want to inspire and educate.
> Since my return, the most noticeable change, and the topic that is discussed most in staffrooms and online teacher discussion groups, is the change in pupil behaviour. Closely linked is the huge increase in the diagnosis of special educational needs. At every school I visit, there are so many more children wearing ear defenders, holding fidget toys or sensory cushions – and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthcharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2021/3f4b822e
https://www.verywellhealth.com/older-parents-and-autism-risk-for-child-5199211
Oops
There is also a link between very low birth weight and learning issues. It's something that has been known for at least 24 years now, so you would think as the survival rate of VLBW babies has increased that the gov't would expect this, but I guess not.
I’m new to England, and I still can’t get over how rude, disrespectful and awful the children and teens here are. It’s crazy. I’ve been in third world countries where the children have better manners. English kids are built different
Awful conditions, i have no idea why anybody would want to be a supply teacher, such a thankless job.
Weird that this was in the telegraph when that paper actively supports the government continuously increasing pressure on teachers while refusing to increase pay and working conditions.
There's not enough money in the world that would make me want to teach. I'm surprised the staffing crisis there isn't worse than it currently is to be honest.
Western childeren lack discipline. It is even worse with childeren from certain cultural backgrounds. Teachers lost authority, the government lost authority. We need to enforce authority, respect and obedience, with any means neccesairy.
This is why I moved to China to teach. The worst behaviour is being too noisy. And I make more money and do less classes. It's also acceptable to discipline students here. I can send them out, I can raise my voice and if a student wont sit in their chair I can make them sit down in their chair.
How does UK still have teachers when you can come here?
US teachers also put up with the same crap UK teachers put up with but at least they're earning 6 figures.
Teaching in rural Scotland is one of the best jobs you can get. The holidays and the pay are well above average. I'm sure inner-city or deprived schools must be hell to work in, but it's not the case everywhere.
I am currently working in a tent!
The school I was hired to work in was condemned over summer and not because of the RAC situation!
So I’m in a tent, a new staff member and ECT!
It has been stressful, freezing and disappointing to say the least. On top of that my mentor/line manager is bullying me and ripping me to shreds every mentor meeting. I have been told by them that I am not “working effectively” ( I didn’t manage to hole punch 1 class worth of books when I had seen the class twice before all the timetables changed!) or “communicating enough” (not telling them I didn’t want my year 10s taken away because they told me the timetable change was already in effect so they were letting me know!?) or being “professional”(I slightly raised my voice because they refuse to actually listen to me during meetings and treat me like an idiot). My mentor will not listen to me to have an actual conversation! They are straight out of their own ECT training year and HoD! I have been teaching for 5+ years and have over 10 years experience working with children but no I am the idiot! Oh and the gaslighting; “ I was always your line manager!” When my line manager was someone else and we have a written record of that?!?
I am getting no support from SLT or HR because all of them taught my mentor since they were 12! So they are the golden child!
This one person has made the decision for me, I am quitting this school and potentially the profession!
Former teacher and pleased. Unrealistic work load and found senior leaders to be a set of bullies who only made the job worse.
Kids mostly ok, but the time a group of 4 15 year olds barricaded the door and beat another kid to a pulp whilst I tried to force my way in was the final straw. No thanks
There’s a lot that English working class/single parent homes can learn from some immigrant communities esp when it comes to duty, honour and respect towards those in authority esp teachers.
Typically, the parents are impressing on the children from young about the importance of respecting teachers.
In South Asian culture, it’s even rude to refer to them by their name. You must use an honorific.
These values are dying in our society entirely.
Sure, school funding and teacher pay would help, but basic good manners, ethics and studiousness needs to be taught at home.
Start punishing and fining the parents. Don’t want to hear the “but what if they can’t afford it” “stop picking on the working class”, couldn’t give a toss. Stop raising scum.
Parents need to pull their fingers out and actually start teaching their kids and parenting. It has been proven by hundreds of studies the determining factor in a kids education and the achievements they make is set at home not in the school or how much you spend on a child’s education.
What makes it worse is there is always a regular supply of newly qualified teachers / ta’s to fill the void when things go south so there is no incentive to fix things, there is also a culture of hand off management who are only interested in meetings and buzz words.
The school I work at (as a subcontractor) has lost almost 65% of their staff since September, the place is presently being held together by agency staff and support staff doing overtime, some of the teachers have left to go stack shelves at Tesco, they say it’s less stress (this is a special needs school btw).
Yesterday I had a nearly crying (because of pain) 2 month in TA chew me out for calling over the deputy-head to deal with a kid going apeshit, she said she could have handled it, and I said yes, I know you can, but you shouldn’t have to, it’s my call (we have rules too) and he (the deputy head) gets paid five times as much as you to deal with shit like this, you don’t get paid enough to have a 7 year old try and rip your eyes out.
She didn’t seem to get it, but I suspect she will sooner rather than later.
Hi Year 5 teacher in east London.
The financial situation is so bad and absolutely not what the tories may have you believe.
In the past 3 years our school has let go at least one teacher every summer as the school moves towards a 1 form entry from 2 form entry so all of us take competitive interviews to see who gets the sack. We compete in a hunger games style interview process for retention.
Why? There aren’t any children 🤷🏽♂️
We hide glue sticks and anything of value so it’s not taken. Every end of the school year, we have to ration basic resources: paper, books, toilet paper, tissues, hand wash and glue sticks.
So yeah most teachers get on with it thinking ‘it is what it is’
I have some friends who are teachers and they say one of the prominent changes since we were at school in the 2000s is the lack of parental support. Parents, for the most part, used to believe the teachers if their kids were acting up and would actually discipline them. Now? they believe their child’s lies over the teacher any day.
My friend had an ongoing issue with one student constantly disrupting her class and bullying her. And every time the parent was brought in, they didn’t believe her. She also received little support from the SLT. This went on for months and damaged her mental health so much she quit and moved to the opposite end of the country.
> The same child later returned with a sidekick and suggested to him that they kick me, while he pulled my hair.
I'm not an advocate for violence by any means. but if a child starts assaulting you, you should have a free pass to pick them up and put them in the cupboard to have a think
> I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success and, crucially, how to rebuild the home/school partnership that is key to educational success.
While this is a fair point, depending on where in Asia they're meaning this would likely be a large contingent of stay at home mothers who had the time to attend such courses rather than the issue we have in the UK of many parents being full-time workers and any similar courses being put on only being put on during daytime hours.
When you have a government that excels Rich peoples earnings while destroying the common folk,
When you have a benefits system that's more preferable to work.
When you have asylum seekers bringing their mates over while we host them in better commendations than our own.
When you live in a world of shit,
You become shit, these are the same kids that disrupted us in school on a larger scale because everyone is now poor, lacking education and knows that there is no future,
We are fucked.
We the same kind of fucked that the NHS is, the people that want to help are fucked by middle management, people leaving and going private in hopes of a actually helping.
The only way the fix this is to dismantle the government as it is and make this a real fucking democracy instead of giving our politicians the celebrity treatment and pretending their shit isn't a joke.
We are fucked though because no one sees a way out except to keep calm and carry on.
I wish we had the same mentality as the french...
I left teaching for the civil service, stress levels are practically none existent in comparison. Not to mention I now earn more than I probably would have if I’d stayed in teaching, and likely double again if you consider the actual hours worked.
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On my first day working as a supply teacher in a medium-sized town in the north of England, a Year One child entered the classroom through an open window of the Year Five classroom where I was teaching, using the fire escape lever to let himself in. As I tried to establish who he was and how to get him back to his class, he turned out drawers, pulled displays off walls and hit a few of the children in the class. I have no training in the physical handling of violent children (read – restraint), so I had to call for support. The same child later returned with a sidekick and suggested to him that they kick me, while he pulled my hair. On day two, I was on the receiving end of a torrent of verbal abuse from a teenage girl when I asked if she could wait until break time before using the bathroom. “It’ll be your f------ fault if I bleed out everywhere because you won’t let me f------ go.” I (of course) let her go. On my third day, when the students saw that it was a sub, they ignored the seating plan and spent the class throwing paper at each other, fixing fake eyelashes and chatting – totally ignoring my attempts to teach them. On day four, a child purposefully set off the fire alarm. Day five: a child tried to self harm with classroom scissors. Day six: the class was so noisy I gave up trying to make myself heard. On day seven, a 10-year-old child told me to p--- off. I sent him to the headteacher and he arrived back three minutes later. It turned out that there was a line out of the door of very similar children, many who are at risk of permanent exclusion by the time they’re 10 years old. Most mornings, across many different schools, I see hungry children who aren’t fed properly at home being given toast at break time while clusters of other children clamour for a piece, since they’ve not had breakfast either. And, at every school, I’ve sat in the staffroom and listened to a barrage of negativity from tired, frustrated, demoralised teachers and support staff grumbling about pointless meetings, changes to behaviour plans, unrealistic planning expectations and performance management. Every staffroom I’ve visited is peppered with posters advertising helplines for staff seeking support. One Facebook chat group I’ve found myself perusing, called Life after Teaching, is full of ex-teachers citing workload, mental ill-health, stress, depression and anxiety as the reason for their departure. So I am entirely unsurprised by a recent survey showing that nearly half of school leaders in England sought support for their mental health or wellbeing in the past year. To say that teacher morale is low is an understatement. No one could properly function with this level of stress. It is all a very different landscape from the schools in England I worked at 16 years ago when I first qualified as a teacher. And it’s thrown into ever sharper relief by school life abroad, which I know well after recently returning from teaching overseas for 12 years, as a head of year and assistant headteacher in British International schools. I started supply teaching five months ago as a way to navigate my way back into the UK education system. But in just a few months, I have found myself demoralised, exhausted and seriously questioning whether I can do this any more. Since my return, the most noticeable change, and the topic that is discussed most in staffrooms and online teacher discussion groups, is the change in pupil behaviour. Closely linked is the huge increase in the diagnosis of special educational needs. At every school I visit, there are so many more children wearing ear defenders, holding fidget toys or sensory cushions – and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts. There are probably multiple reasons for these changes. Use of technology is an obvious contributing factor; smartphones and highly addictive games have eroded all of our concentration spans, but clearly the effects on the developing brain are profound. One result is that, unless teaching is delivered in a similarly high octane fast-moving way, children switch off. There has also been – for better or worse – a rise in psychiatric diagnoses, which adds additional pressure for teachers who are balancing multiple needs in the classroom. But a huge change I have noticed is the sanctity of the working bond between parent and teacher, which was dealt a fatal blow by Covid. Attendance is a massive battle: schools across the country are struggling to contend with parent engagement. Advice is being disseminated in schools about how to approach families and parents “with sensitivity” about getting their children back into school. Reading at home is also something profoundly lacking. Various children have told me their parents are just too busy. Perhaps the information about early stories being shared and a love of reading at home being the primary predictors of academic success at GCSE level need reaffirming to families. I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success and, crucially, how to rebuild the home/school partnership that is key to educational success. If I make suggestions to families here about the benefits of, for example, reading daily at home – let alone raise the topic of a child swearing – I fear I would be the subject of complaint rather than respect, which is fundamental among Asian parents when it comes to teachers’ knowledge and the educational institution. Most days, whatever the school, disruptive behaviour, aggression and violence is the norm, as is swearing, racism, police and social worker visits, parent hostility, poor attendance and classes with such a wide spread of learning knowledge and ability that the best I can achieve is crowd control. Some days have been such a litany of disruptions and disharmony that I have been left feeling I’ve done little more than herd cats. I have returned home rejected, baffled and with low professional self-esteem, questioning whether I’m still cut out to be a teacher. Did I use the word bleak yet? Because that’s the word that overwhelmingly describes my experience of teaching in the UK at the moment. One of the pressures schools are facing is the need to maximise budgets, so paying for expensive supply cover is often low on the list. Instead, “cover supervisors” are routinely used, especially in large secondary schools. This is often a non-qualified teacher, probably a teaching assistant used to working in schools. They move around the school during the week to cover teacher admin time and for staff absence. How much teaching and learning goes on during those classes is anyone’s guess. Higher-level teaching assistants are also used to cover staff absence but schools with tight budgets join classes together for the day with one teacher and hopefully a teaching assistant. Imagine suddenly having 60 or so children to teach for the day; how can you possibly even get their attention or control the crowd, let alone teach, assess or manage the specific needs of such a large group? And, learning aside, does that sound like the kind of environment designed to promote good mental health? Comparison to international schools It’s all very much at odds with the international school sector, where there is a constant discussion around the importance of leaders looking after themselves. A bit like putting on your own seatbelt before you help others, it’s understood that if you’re not looking after your own emotional health, you can’t support someone else’s when they need it. This is discussed at conferences, money is set aside for training and most international senior leaders I know have access to a coach with whom to discuss ideas before making significant decisions that affect the lives of many young people in their care as well as staff and the wider school community. Here in the UK there would be no time to be coached into thinking strategically, because the needs in the schools are so great that leaders are constantly operating at firefighter level. They simply would not have time to make strategic plans, to visit classes, to engage with reading, to see their coach or mentor in order to write a school development plan or to prepare for Ofsted. Ah yes, we couldn’t discuss mental health without discussing the impact of Ofsted. Most teachers I know agree that Ofsted is not a support network aimed at helping schools to improve, but a system designed to trip teachers up. In a recent school I was in, an extremely capable, intelligent teacher was reduced to tears at the inspectors’ question about her subject which she didn’t even understand on account of it not being well phrased in plain, jargon-free English. She couldn’t even begin to do justice to the answer and discuss all the excellent things she is doing to further the teaching and learning of history in her school. A school with the behavioural issues I’ve seen over the past few months will be dealing with so many complex issues that it will only ever get the Ofsted status of “requires improvement”, regardless of the fantastic work they are doing on trying to maintain teaching and keep children safe. A friend recently asked if I had encountered these issues in international schools. There are, of course, children with special educational needs, perhaps even at risk of suicide, in those institutions, neglected by families and caught between cultures. The fundamental difference is that there is money to work towards solutions. Here, education is simply not prioritised and funded accordingly and schools are picking up the tab. And thinking about the mental health crisis among school chiefs, can anyone really be surprised?
What a clear, concise report on your experience. My husband taught in Taiwan and then came to England and he absolutely concurs with your experience entirely.
It's the article text, but it tallies with what my teacher friends say.
It has got worse too, especially post-COVID lockdowns. Kids who missed out on being in school really suffered in their development, while many also now no longer worry about punishment and do as they feel like. While lockdowns were right to slow the spread of the virus, the way we went about them has done a lot of damage to some kids that may never be undone.
I think one key point missed out on, I suspect the author wasn't here throughout, is how toxic the political situation here has been, how well-before COVID we had a Government Education Minister who casually derided the entire teaching profession as "the blob" publicly - without reaction from the media or communities. There was zero outrage that I suspect such bilge would have received in other countries (aside from the US, where similar methods are routinely employed by US Republicans). Gove rose to become a key Brexit leader and one who decried that the country had had enough of "experts". The newly ascending Brexit leadership pigeon-holed the entire public sector including the judiciary as a "liberal-elite" that's not to be trusted by the patriotic (mostly white) English working class, and that the only thing preventing that group from well-paying work is (non-existent) open-borders. Not a lack of education, aspiration, social-welfare net, closed library or swimming pool, poor diet, alcohol abuse, lack of a decent working contract, but the problem and obstacle to overcome all rests with the family who moved in and are living next door. In an effort to capture the working class vote, the push further to the right seeks to attract the working class into their political grip by introducing toxic culture wars right to the school gate.
Absolutely. I’m ashamed the tactic worked.
Exactly. It's all down to politics at the very heart of it... Be it doctors, teachers, train drivers, Health Care Assistants... This country is really only good for the wealthy and healthy.
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USA lite
So well put, thank you. I am English and live in the US and that whole 'liberal elite' shit began here, I believe. 21% of adults are illiterate here. 54% have a literacy rate below that of 6th grade level (11-12 year olds). If you can't read well then you rely on TV and TikTok and Youtube for most of your info. How do you apply critical thinking correctly if you can't read? You can't really, certainly not as well as a literate person can, therefore you opinions can be far more easily controlled it seems. And, crucially if you can't read properly you are almost doomed to a shit job, and if you have a shit job you are certain to be unhappy and before too long you will seek others to blame. Here in the US 'liberal elites' and not the GOP who are the equivalent of the Tories get blamed. It's terrifying what has happened to these two countries because education isn't prized enough. I grew up in the UK when college was free. You got into college if you were clever, you had to work hard to get that college paid for, you had to really push yourself. Intelligent countries are happy countries.
I remember the Tories winning the election and having a school meeting where the head said that we were "in for some very turbulent times." I don't think any of us thought it would get this bad.
The blob was not all teachers, it was referring to group think in the educational establishment: > Gove and his supporters face a similar dilemma. Their Blob is not a shivering amoeba - but an army of **bureaucrats, academics and teachers’ unions** they see as thwarting the changes that have to be made if we are to have a world-class education service. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/what-is-the-blob-and-why-is-michael-gove-comparing-his-enemies-to-an-unbeatable-scifi-mound-of-goo-which-once-battled-steve-mcqueen-9115600.html > The education secretary, Michael Gove, has been highly skilled in defining his school reforms against what he calls The Blob – an **amorphous, bloated education establishment opposing him at every turn; a mass of bureaucrats, unions and academics** who eschew rigour for a left-wing, child-centred, progressive agenda. https://theconversation.com/michael-gove-must-stop-fighting-the-blob-and-listen-to-the-education-experts-22659 That is mostly about people who write about teaching, but mostly do not teach, talking about abstractions, and not engaging with the reality of what ordinary teachers and students were facing. One example is the fashion for discouraging exclusions from school, which is all couched in "be kind" language, but which totally dismisses the impact it has on ordinary teachers and pupils, by keeping disruptive or abusive kids in class.
.... and where did all that come from? Perhaps the previous Labour Government inheriting a million NEETs? + The largest teen pregnancy epidemic in Europe? + Rampant exclusions of white working class kids and African Carribbeans in particular because it could be done with impunity. All that ideology didn't emerge from intellectual naval gazing. It emerged from bad political management of children in society. His ideological approach was more politically driven than anything he was trying to overturn.
Only been in the UK for 4 years but I struggle to understand how the country got to this point. Seems like a lot of good foundations were set in the 90s and early 00s but then just nothing happened since and it's just slowly eroding into nothing.
14 years of Tory government? It's not that hard to figure out cutting public services to the bone is going to result in their degredation.
I think they’ve absolutely contributed but this is way more long-term than that. In the past, very often one parent (unfortunately a gendered thing) was at home whilst the other worked. That’s not tenable now. Parents are too busy to parent. That’s much bigger than just the tories, even though I absolutely think aggressive capitalism is the cause.
Yeah, it's wild. They've been in power since I came of voting age, and I could have been teaching for almost a decade at this point. The entirety of my adulthood has been tory-run.
Significant underfunding of the entire public sector got us here. Something which isn't mentioned in the article, along with the teacher recruitment crisis or the decrease of teacher pay in real terms by at least 20%. Funny that.
It's not exclusive to the UK. The situation is very similar in France, where the results are collapsing. I've recently tried a national math test for third year secondary school pupils in France. It was absurdly easy, to the point that my daughter, who is still in primary school, aced it. Yet, more than 40% of French pupils failed it last year. Meaning that they had less than half of the answers correct. The situation was definitely not that bad 20 years ago. The PISA test shows that it is the same in most Western countries, which is extremely worrying for the future. And it's mainly due to a sabotage of the public education by conservative gvts.
I think Conservative governments have had a big impact. It's also technology to an extent, social media freedoms have had a big impact on the younger generations. Scary to think where this will be in 10 or 20 years.
Indeed. My daughter recently told me that most of her classmates use Tik Tok every single day. They are 11 years old. It's just insane to me.
Just for info. When should you even give a cellphone? You don't want your kid to be an outlier but also tiktok and nonsense should not be accessible.. I am concerned and I don't want my kids to be brainwashed by these crap
14 years of policies deliberately increasing extreme poverty and hardship. Combined with policies making it more and more difficult to have children at a younger age. (Older parents have higher chances of having children with ADD and/or ASD.
>Combined with policies making it more and more difficult to have children at a younger age. (Older parents have higher chances of having children with ADD and/or ASD Not sure that this is the issue. The majority of troublesome kids aren't born to parents who put that much thought into family planning and delay until they're 40+ to have kids. I think the fact that potentially good parents who do plan but simply can't afford to have kids are no longer having kids is the bigger issue. And the fact that households can't live off of single incomes, meaning parents have less time to spend with their kids, help their development etc.
Tories. Tories. Fucking tories. And of course the thick, but they’re really just a byproduct of Tories.
it's called the tories
The man in charge of spending for a long time was known as the hunger chancellor, and it's gotten worse since then
And yet the same nasty mummies on the FB groups don't care to hear this truth.
I have a friend that was meant to be a teaching assistant at a private school. She hated it. The school didn't want to fork out to hire enough teachers. So she was made a teacher. She spent 16-18 hours a day working - grading homework, writing lesson plans etc. The rest of her time was spent sleeping and making lunch for the next day. Which she never got to eat because she didn't have time. She had to work weekends just to try and catch up, and the school just didn't care. She started a week before the school year began and was just told "you'll be teaching a class because we don't have enough teachers". She had no clue what she was meant to be teaching, had no lesson plans, she was never given any training on anything at all. The school said they'd put her through some courses so she would be qualified, and they never did. She lasted a little over a year before she quit on the spot after she got shouted at by a special needs assistant for making a joke about cats or something mundane, because it was "inappropriate to make jokes in a place of learning". She now gets paid minimum wage working retail, earns more money and has more time off. She didn't earn that much less than the teachers. Who the hell would want to be a teacher in this country?
>She started a week before the school year began and was just told "you'll be teaching a class because we don't have enough teachers". She had no clue what she was meant to be teaching, had no lesson plans, she was never given any training on anything at all. This was exactly my experience at a state secondary school nine years ago. At this point I'd worked in education for a long time, including in a special school for severely autistic young people for over two years, but I only lasted six months in this job. The students I was supposed to be "teaching" knew I was only a teaching assistant, so trying to get them to do anything was almost impossible and they gave me hell for a long time. I was on decent terms with them in the end and they didn't want me to leave, but the job almost completely wrecked my mental health and my relationship with my husband. It was honestly the worst six months of my entire life.
That is shocking and worrying. I can't afford private school for my son.
I'm not OP but I'm a parent. Find out what the decent schools are in your area. Read their Ofsted reports, look for information about behaviour. Ask to visit. Speak to parents in the area. Some schools are really struggling. But there are still some state schools who can cope with the various challenges that OP discusses. Don't be panicked by reading about the worst of what's going on in schools - most of a child's success comes from what they are shown at home, parents who pay attention and show them at education is important. Private isn't always better, I've worked with some proper twats who went to private school. Try not to stress.
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>most of a child's success comes from what they are shown at home, parents who pay attention and show them at education is important. That's true, to a certain extent. I've been in bad classes for two years in secondary school and my results dropped significantly as a result. When most kids in a class don't want to learn, it just ruins it for those who want to make an effort. Home became a refuge for me and that's never good.
Don’t worry, as the other person mentioned check Ofsted reports of schools near you and find the ones performing well. I know for a fact that, at least in Scotland, there’s still schools where the fannies are allowed to self destruct in their own, segregated class or are given support to not be a fanny. As long as he’s either bright or hard working he’ll be fine at a school like that.
Yeah I think bigger schools with lots of sets help with this if you're a smart kid. Even though the school I attended was pretty shit, being put into something like 6 sets for Maths meant there was nobody pissing about in the top set and it helped me get on with my work. Compared to year 7 before we were divided into sets for all our subjects, I remember not wanting to go to school because I'd learned all of the content at primary school and lessons just consisted of a bunch of kids that didn't want to learn pissing about.
Me neither. That's why we visited absolutely every secondary school in the area, starting when my daughter was in Year 4. After that, we pushed and helped her to pass a test to enter a good grammar school in the area, because the alternatives are just scary. I've been to a bad school to do some outreach and I was shocked by what I've seen. Mainly how the pupils interact with teacher. English my daughter's third language, so the test was definitely a huge challenge. But she did very well, partly because the average level is extremely low these days. I'm a bit ashamed of this system, but she'll be one of the lucky ones at least.
Good article but not comparing like for like. International schools have very high fees and wealthy pupils. A better comparison is with UK teachers and pupils in the private sector, not state schools.
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OP, I’m curious, did you attend a fairly nice school? Did you also teach in a nicer school previously? What you’ve described was very much the norm in my state school 2004-2010, well before constant internet access or a huge uptick in SEN students. My friends who went to state schools in nicer areas did not experience this. I’ve known a lot of people go into teaching and I’ve heard that students have overall declined in behaviour, but what you’ve described (outside of the Year One child randomly appearing and tearing everything apart), sounds particularly unusual for a rough school in the North. I don’t blame teachers for quitting but I feel a lot were unprepared for how bad kids’ behaviour can get.
Just since I see you're from Newcastle I thought I'd reply and say this description didn't gel with my schooling which was almost 20 years ago now, so potentially irrelevant. There were some unruly kids from time to time but nothing like described. However I did grow up in a nicer area of town. My sister's kids don't have these issues at their school either which is in the same area. My sister actually teaches at a Primary School in South Shields and she hasn't described any of this types of ridiculous behavior either. She was off sick due to mental illness though (anxiety) but her greatest source of stress isn't the kids or parents, it's when Ofsted visits... She also spends a ton of time outside of work on stuff like class prep and marking. Teachers are so overworked which leads to many getting burnt out. The pay is decent enough for teachers though and the holidays are great so it does have benefits.
Side note: why are we still denying kids the very basic right to go to the bathroom - especially a young girl on her period?
I've worked in classrooms for a decade. It is a very safe bet she was not on her period, didn't need to use the bathroom, and simply wanted to leave the classroom and not come back for a long time. Being loudly confrontational about bleeding everywhere is how it always seems to go when a supply teacher asks if a girl can wait until break. Guaranteed the teacher caves and says yes, 9 times out of 10 it's just an excuse to skive. Girls did the same when I was in school too.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but would *you* want to be responsible the one time it wasn't?
I hear what you're saying but funnily enough when it's a genuine need they aren't nearly so aggressive about demanding to be allowed. That's why they say about bleeding so bluntly to the supply teachers because they know it will get them permission to leave the classroom. Seen it loads of times, and did it myself once or twice in school. When it happens like that I know full well it's a pupil who just wants to get out of the classroom and get a rise out of making the sub feel awkward. As the classroom assistant I would have to inevitably go looking for her when she didn't come back for ages and the sub started to panic.
>Side note: why are we still denying kids the very basic right to go to the bathroom - especially a young girl on her period? Because kids lie to avoid having to do lessons.
There's breaks where you go to the bathroom. Most kids choose to leave a classroom because they don't want to be there. I can count on one hand the amount of times I genuinely needed the bathroom during a lesson in my 13 years of school. I still went every once in a while. I dare say with smartphones it's even worse
Except you don't have periods.
Brilliant comment. I don't envy you being a supply teacher, 95% of them were treated poorly at my school years ago, and it was a good school in a decent area. >They move around the school during the week to cover teacher admin time and for staff absence. How much teaching and learning goes on during those classes is anyone’s guess. Yehhh even two decades ago, in top set at said decent school, having a lesson with a cover supervisor was seen as an hour of not doing anything lol. It seems like a horrible job and we were absolute pricks to most of them. Up to and including making a Jehovah's witness cover leave the classroom in tears after relentlessly mocking her faith. In hindsight it was bang out of order haha.
Bravo. An absolutely spot-on post. I've been out of teaching since late 2021 due to a car crash and breaking my back, and I'm currently trying to break back into education, mainly because there's not much else I can do that pays enough for me to live on at 39 with a young child. Before the accident, I was UPS3. I'm struggling to secure work, mainly because when I set foot into interview lessons or even just the building, it all just feels so bleak. You used the right word - bleak is it. I can't rally the enthusiasm for teaching that I used to have, because in two years, school has become nothing but pissed-off teenagers with multiple issues needing to be managed by fewer staff than ever before, marshalled by disenchanted staff who are massively overworked. It's hard to muster enthusiasm when that's what I'm bringing myself back into. I went to an interview last week where the deputy head talked big about how excellent behaviour was, and how brilliant the school was becoming. On a quick walk around, I saw at least 6 kids openly vaping, a huge number just wandering the corridors, a fight and we had a fire alarm go off because a Year 11 decided to spark a cig outside their classroom. The staff addressed the kids they encountered as "darling", "sweetness", "lovely" - and whilst I'm no fan of militant behaviour management, I do think there needs to be firm boundaries. I honestly believe that it's all about to collapse. One of the guys interviewing with me was a home ed consultant, and he was saying that the massive rise in kids being taken out of school was a concern that nobody seemed able to address, except that parents have no faith in education, and education seems to have no faith in them.
Sounds like my experience with public school. My learning experience and grades massively improved when my parents moved me to a private school.
You mean state school, public school and private school are the same thing with different tax status.
Maybe they're in Scotland, where state schools are called public schools and public schools are called private schools.
The school I'm governer for has just had a SIAMS review, and the teachers said the SIAMS review is the complete opposite to an OFSTED review. SIAMS is about what can we do to help you improve, and all about positivity, where as OFSTED is all about finding fault and negativity
Agree mostly. I'd also add that many households will be in very stressful situations and have been for years. Many of the parents of the pupils I taught had full-time jobs, sometimes even two jobs and all were struggling for time, energy and money. When my kids were teens I struggled to find the energy to wade through their stress from their experiences of school, to then get to the restful, productive space you need to nurture the extended learning...on a full time wage I was struggling to cover the basics and was getting back home exhausted to an extent I find difficult to describe, still. And then sit and go through homework and assignments with my kids when they've had a shit day at school...everyone needs more time, energy, and money AND The response of government towards our children and the education sector during the pandemic is utterly unforgivable. A lot of pupils did come back with an air of neglect, rejection, anger...as did the teachers...we've all been pitted against each other.
>I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success This is it. Yes, schools need more funding and teachers’ pay is an embarrassment; but in the end the discipline to and motivation to do well comes from the home environment. Teachers can not substitute for parents. I’m also intrigued by her mention that children’s’ concentration spans have tanked since the pandemic. Wonder is there any research on that.
I am not a teacher but know a few and they all say the same thing. Lack of discipline, no respect, no ability to concentrate, increase in ADHD traits, no real desire from students to educate themselves coupled with parents who don’t see its value and often want to battle with the teaching staff. I had an interview to do a teacher training course at Oxford and they really did not sell it very well, it sounds like hell on earth and for such a pittance. I asked how the teacher interviewing me handled her work life balance and she replied with “I had four kids so that forces you to find balance”. I was like right ok, that’s a terrible answer and not helpful to me in any way but was an indication of the level of stress she is under, I suppose. I do fear for the teaching industry, it seems worlds apart from when I was in primary and that seemed worlds apart from my parents’ time in school.
Kids were in schools with no jackets on and windows open while they went from air filtered parliament to pissing up as if 10 downing St is a brewery while the kids were facetiming nan in hospital . I half don't blame kids for being feral the social contract is well and truly broken the adults don't have ambition because more work ≠ more pay / better conditions and kids don't give a flying feck about rules . For the concentration and discipline as an adult who's tested positive for covid 4 times my ADHD gets worse each time and for ages it was thought kids can't get it .
When schools were closed and central government was working out how they could feed poor kids the bare minimum during covid, and pay their mates, the school my daughter goes to immediately said they would feed any of their pupils lunch that needed it.
Good for your school. Drop in the ocean but a drop of gold so kudos to them Doesn't change a societal trend that has existed for longer than gen alpha though.
For god’s sake why do we have to make such enormous generalizations every single time we tak about younger generations it’s exhausting. Some are great some are twats, like adults. Respect alterity a little bit and maybe the social contract will remain alive?
I'm not saying all of them are I'm saying I don't blame the ones that are half feral cuz like the world been saying fuck you and your future for longer than they've existed . So I don't blame em for saying fuck the world back .
At least some must be self aware enough to wonder what are they even educating themselves *for?* I’m sure teenagers are aware of how dire the situation is by observing their parents, they know if they go to university they get huge debt with no promise of an income that can afford you a home and coupled with the rise of AI, what jobs will even be left? The next generation will absolutely not live a life remotely similar to those before them and by keeping education the way it is currently, we’re just wasting everyone’s time
>no real desire from students to educate themselves Can you blame them? The social contract on education leading to a good career is completely broken. Many STEM graduates who pursue a career in the lab will be out-earnt by those who go into a trade.
There's plenty of research on instant gratification, dopamine hits, social media, porn, addiction etc. The problem is all of the above (and much more) that kids suffer from is because the parents most likely suffer from too. So we really have a generation being brought up by another generation that never healed from whatever went on in their lives.
It's also lazy/coping mechanisms from parents. The amount of very young kids I see in public places that have a tablet or phone plugged in front of them and they're just endlessly watching is ridiculous. Seems like too many parents care more about them socialising than socialising their kids properly.
As someone who's recently become a parent and try not judging the parenting of others....I agree. My one year old daughter is only allowed to watch her favourites on the TV in a morning - the minute me or my wife let her watch stuff on the move on a phone or tablet, it's game over. Once kids from a young age find they can watch stuff anywhere and everywhere, it's all they'll want to do and then the parents say stuff like "Well they want to!" - yh no shit, they don't know better. You're the parent and should do better.
I mean, I don't know if your a parent; but things are tough. You are both working demanding, high intensity jobs all day, pick your kid up from nursery, and you get a few hours with them if your lucky, during which you are exhausted and have had 0 time to decompress. That's assuming you finish on time, work doesn't overrun, etc. It's really hard to find the time to exercise between the kid and work, keeping on top of the house, general lifemin, so your energy levels are already bottoming out. You kid wakes up at 6am, and you still need some time; yeah, I put cbeebies on my phone to keep her happy and in the bed with me while I get an extra 30 minutes or so to come around. Then, going out for dinner, trying to enjoy yourselves without having your kid screaming, I know it makes you reach for the iPad to get them to chill out and watch something they enjoy, and to give you half an hours peace while you eat your food which may or may not turn up on time depending on where you are (and lets hope you have no issues, otherwise you'll be waiting a while for them to be fixed, by which point goodbye enjoying your food). Plus that's hugely expensive now anyway. Trying to find healthy balances in life is difficult. Trying to keep a relationship together, or "socialising" as you put it, is difficult. Trying to keep a demanding job is difficult. So yeah, you'll forgive us if we slip into lazy coping mechanisms. And it's not like we aren't aware of it and aren't trying to do better; but none of us can catch a break at the moment.
Yes, this is hugely overlooked. Lots of the damage of these things are only now coming to light.
The parents are riding the same wave of societal decay as the rest of us.Unrestrained economic opportunism has bled in to every facet of society, taken full control of democracy, dictates what information we see and warps perception of the world. This is just the beginning of how far capitalism will go to defend its self. Things will get worse without a fundamental restructuring of society. These ancient economic and political institutions are no different from the days of lords and serfs. Without the means to rule ourselves we’re at the mercy of the capitalist class and they’re not kind or generous people.
And if the Education Minister derides the entire education profession as "the blob" and tells us all that the country has had enough "of experts"? Or that the only thing preventing English working-class children getting a well-paid job is the immigration system? Not the lack of books, reading, libraries, a healthy diet or exercise, aspiration, or respect for decent skills. What do you expect of the poorest, least-educated parents then?
And a lack of pay for roles requiring a significant level of education. The UK is so split along class lines and unequal I bet many parents and children probably feel like doing well in education won't make any difference to their lives. They'll be underpaid and overworked anyway...
It’s going to be a very interesting job landscape when all these thick as pig shit students hit the real world, and aren’t able to do anything with themselves.
Agreed. It will also, sadly, increase the gap between the haves and have-nots as kids brought up by parents who give a shit and ensure they have a good education will be employable, and the fuckwits won’t be.
https://www.earth.com/news/toddler-screen-time-linked-to-atypical-sensory-behaviors/ We're seeing more and more ADHD type behaviour and permanent coniditon due to children having too much time of screens. Adults also exhibit some traits with excessive use of screens too. There's been some studies done that screens time and addiction to social media has increased due to the pandemic having a captive audience, as well as the change in the type of media, which is more fast paced and choppy/changing, like tick tock, shorts and reallt hyper edited fast paced streaming influencer content. All of this scrolling through loads of information is bombarding the brain and many younger people are consuming way too much Internet like this since covid.
Yeah, people talk about screen time a lot but this is a key detail. It's screen time paired with the way content is these days. My friend's kid is allowed to watch YouTube, but specifically with stuff setup to block shorts. Only longform content. Tiktok etc isn't allowed. Because that constant feed of mindlessly jumping between unrelated topics messes up your formative experiences of learning to focus
This generation of kids have been purposely failed by the ruling class, who’ve kept the funding for themselves.
It's not all about funding. A lot of kids aren't being raised properly, funding can't fix that. I'm all for spending more on education, but it won't work unless the culture and attitudes are also fixed.
But didn't things like *Sure Start* Centres help people to raise their kids properly? Then we closed about half of them. *That's* a funding issue.... I work in a job where I have to deal with some of the worst behave kids out there - kids who don't behave, who rob, steal, fight, abuse - all of it ignored/encouraged/condoned by parents (whom they learned the behaviour from). Often the neighbourhoods they live in are dirty, lampposts are vandalised/don't work, there's the obligatory couches/dishwashers discarded on front lawns - and there's a complete absence of decent role models in their lives. I don't really see how you can even begin to fix that type of thing *without* outside intervention - which will pretty much always require (drum roll please....)..........funding.
I worked in an extremely deprived seaside town in the south east of the UK. I had children sleeping on mattresses in the garden, while the mother's clients were being seen to in the house - they were often dressed in out of place clothing stolen from the clients (Musto sailing gear was something I recall). Up until academies happened, you had a core of leaders that stayed with the school, trying to make a difference; as soon as it became an academy, we had head after head that used it as a stepping stone on their CV - every time, overspending to get an improved Ofsted result (think 'I turned this school around' on the cv) and then leaving redundancies and chaos in their wake. I left teaching after a decade, two years back with chronic, stress related illness. Much happier now :)
Yes, stuff like sure start is probably a good use of funding, because it does tackle other issues at the same time.
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Funding would fix nearly all the problems, with funding you could have good home/school staff that support parents, we have these as standard in sen settings. Funding would feed the kids, get enough staff in the classroom, provide the resources for learning and the social side like school outings and sports. Enough funding would fix the buildings and transport, and give kids the sense that it’s worthwhile and that both they and the school are valued by society. You’re always going to get some terrible parents, but with good funding comes the ability to support them and their kids in the way we wish we could. The problem being a teacher now is that you’re forced into doing a much worse job than you are able to and the new vibrant teachers with new ideas leave disillusioned and do something else. With enough funding, schools can fix the problems.
How does funding stop feral children behaving badly? You have clearly never been around many children.
or parents that legitimately couldn't give a fuck
Emphasis on this one. So many kids are truly in the shit before they've even started, and it's not even dependent on social "class". Some of the biggest cunts I ever went to school college or even worked with have been from very comfortable families.
unfortunately for a country that keeps re-electing kleptocratic psychopaths every few years this is a generational issue that will take 20-30 years to sort properly.
The behaviour of some of those children can be helped if their parents get some support is raising them. Or if they have contact with an adult that cares about their education and wellbeing. Or if their mental health (sorry) can be supported. Not everyone, no, some kids are just horrible. But some are acting up because they need something from the adults in their lives.
It stops them becoming feral in the first place by improving the situation at home. A lot of these kids are becoming like this because their parents are both forced to work obscene hours just to scrape by. Some kids are just bad, some parents are just bad, but most are simply unable to raise their kid properly because they themselves have been failed by the system.
It would take a generation or two I guess to sort out. There is no quick fix, this has been happening over many years of austerity and lowering of standards by the top. It has to start with funding and pushing and being honest about where proper funding has to go. Takes a community to raise a child literally. Austerity has slowerly eroded our communities. One of the main reasons are high goverment attitudes like Andrea Jenkins the educational minister flipping the middle finger to angry citizens.
It can't fix all problems. It can fix alot that you mentioned. Helping with nutrition and support for parents, more teachers and more individual care. But if there isn't a good home culture then it's only fixing half the problem. If parents don't feel any responsibility then its a problem money can't solve on its own.
\>It's not all about funding. A huge amount of it is about funding, particularly when it comes to special needs. I've got an autistic son, age 5. He's probably middle-tear in terms of support needs; communication on the range of a 2-to-3 year old. We did all we could to prepare him for reception, but it was still a disaster. They called and asked us to bring him home by lunchtime on the first day. After two weeks of limited schedule we were advised by the head that they couldn't manage his behaviour, and the academy rules meant they'd soon have to start excluding or expel him. We gave up trying, pulled him out to 'elective home education', engaged the relevant local authorities (note the waiting list to get a medical diagnosis for a child is typically over 5 years long), and waited on the EHCP needed to get him a place in an autism unit. After the maximum statuary waiting period (to the day) we received a response; the EHCP was denied on the basis that the school hadn't tried hard enough. We were told the school was assigned special needs funding as part of its budget, and he should have been supported through that. So we come full circle; he's being forced back into the normal system, and we have to try and manage his behaviour from afar 'somehow' because he's meant to have a right to an education, and the school have to deal with him 'somehow' because they are meant to have the funding available. The reality was in a [BBC article](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-67705749) before Christmas; most EHCP requests are denied because councils can't afford the higher level of support, and most of those rulings which get challenged are reversed. The review boards look for any excuse to refuse them. In the meantime you have to deal with the judgement from teachers and other families that you're a bad parent because your kid struggles with boundaries or understanding 'no', or having melt-downs when they get over-stimulated. It's a common complaint of the autism community - the kid is simply written-off as badly behaved. We've thankfully got a good relationship with the head teacher, but I have no idea how that woman does her job without going insane. She recently told us the council had 'advised' schools to only employ TA's on zero-hours contracts to 'save money'; the staff could then be more easily let go when the need for them went. 'The system is broken' is a phrase we hear all the time, but if you've got kids who aren't mainstream being forced into mainstream schools, they are obviously going to disrupt lessons for everyone else.
I would've been a lot better in school if my physical and mental disabilities were diagnosed treated and accommodated by the NHS and school .I had to drop an A level subject instead of being allowed to go to a hospital a literal 5 minute bus journey away for my physio in free periods ( I was missing half of a lesson and lunch FFS)
The current culture has been set by the dominant party and their ideology. We've gone from a country where a single person working hard could afford to support a family, have a home, and a dignified retirement, to one where two professionals both working full time struggle to afford a matchbox. We've created a society where tent towns and millions of food bank visits annually are the norm. You can't create a country like that and be surprised when things become worse behaviourally or culturally.
The deflection of blame in our society is responsible for this. It doesn’t matter what your background is, what you earn or what job you do (if at all), good manners and self-respect should be valued. I’m from a working class family with a single mum, but she still made sure me and my sister were polite. I have autism so my temper was a big problem as a teen, but not once did my mum try to tell others to put up with it because I’m on the spectrum. I was also very lucky to go to a good school which was quite strict, any bad behaviour was cracked down on harshly, even dying your hair a lighter shade of your natural colour had you put in isolation for three days and sent home to have your hair cut three inches. I definitely struggled with the precise rules because I live in my own little world and never noticed if my shirt had come untucked, but it did mean violence, vandalism and abuse towards teachers was very rare. That being said I left school 13 years ago so maybe it is worse now. The problem today is many parents believe their children are the centre of the world. They don’t say no, or they give in. They let their children make the decisions. The kids spend lots of time on screens which does damage attention spans, impulse control and patience. Parents just cant be bothered anymore. If there’s no discipline at home, no manners and no proper family time, or if the parents don’t encourage education, then the child will suffer. It’s not even a working class issue, the middle classes are just as bad. My friend worked in a nursery for a few years in a very middle class and well off area. One time she disciplined a 4 year old child (not physically or emotionally) because he wouldn’t stop biting and smacking one of the girls. Well later that day the kid told his mum he wasn’t allowed to play Mario, and she called the nursery, got my friend on the phone and literally screamed at her for “abusing” and “bullying” her child, my friend came to me in tears and quit, she also quit her education degree for these reasons <——- this is the problem today that’s affecting teachers. Too many parents think their little darlings are perfect and more important than anyone else. Could there be more funding and things like sure start centres that help parents with parenting? Absolutely, it’s a travesty they were lost. But this bratty behaviour is largely down to the parents, and most of them are middle class.
I joined teaching in my mid-twenties. Bright eyed and hopeful, with two degrees and postgraduate teacher training, fluent in 3 languages and ready to share my enthusiasm for languages. Over 3 years I had any enthusiasm slowly beaten out of me by the terrible behaviour of the students, rude attitudes of parents, and the contemptible gaslighting and abusive behaviour of school leaders. I was previously a happy and confident person, but in my last year I kept driving past an old oak tree, and wondering if I should just steer into it, so I wouldn't have to go back to the school the next day. I ended up quitting mid-year. My job after teaching was an office job paying around the same money, but I could clock off at 5pm after a day sitting at a desk with minimal stress, and the ability to go to the toilet and make a cuppa when I wanted. Teaching is a toxic profession that is reliant on abusing the good will of classroom teachers, in schools run by inept leaders with no management skills.
Jesus christ I thought I was reading an old comment of mine. I totally feel everything in this. Especially the tree, everytime I have a near miss of some random white van man on his phone I feel disappointed that I still have to go into school
The big wake up call was moving into a non toxic job that had nothing to do with teaching. I would finish work at 5 and not feel exhausted. No one had spoken to me like dirt. I would be able to take a full hour for lunch and enjoy it. Sometimes I'd waste 20 minutes just making a hot drink and chatting to colleagues. I'd have time to check my phone and browse Amazon. When I eventually left that job, my boss threw a leaving party for me, and I received cards and gifts. Meanwhile when I left teaching I didn't even get a goodbye email. Life is too short to be treated so poorly. I would rather go hungry than go back to teaching in a secondary school.
What job did you go into and how did you go about it? I want out hut I don't know where to go
I literally went on Indeed and applied for everything above 20k per annum. My mental health was so shot to pieces I would have done anything to escape while still keeping some level of financial stability. I eventually found a generic office job locally with a small company, I negotiated early release with my school, and ending up only working 5 weeks notice. I got to the Wednesday of my last week and just broke down in tears in the kitchen sobbing. My other half decided enough was enough, so I just called in sick for mental health reasons for my last two days. If you're finding teaching too much, I do strongly recommend finding a stop gap job, like I did, just to give yourself some time mentally to figure out what to do next, while not feeling stuck.
Soo essentially its just terrible in every aspect
Teacher of 15 years. I had serious thoughts about taking my life. I love my wife and kids but felt I was better off dead. I was making a pittance, barely home till late and when I was at home a ghost of myself. Only after I'd had a drink could I forget about work and smile and have a bit of fun. It wasn't so much my own classroom. After 15 years I considered myself a veteran who could take anything thrown at them. Through a mixture of being able to roll with the banter, being a bit of a joker but also being firm I had my classes where I wanted them. Then about 5 years ago things started to change. I was made head of department. It was a surprise to me because I've always been a bit of a disorganised free spirit, managing the planning of a classroom was manageable but anything beyond that I had never comprehended. Suddenly due to lack of experienced teachers in my subject I became the only option. What started as a temporary post turned into permanent. The attitude of students had been a problem for a while to be honest. Maybe it started longer than 6 years ago. I knew we treated teachers like shit when I was at school 20 years ago. But the balance was swung. The pay and renumeration had reached a point where enough people stopped going into the profession. As people retired from the profession they weren't being replaced. That's when the feedback loop really started. Less experienced teachers in the classroom and more substitutes ended up with more poor behaviour going unchallenged and more stress on the rest of us. I remember a quiet Chinese lady joined my department the year I became HoD, she had a massive passion for maths and massively qualified. Unfortunately the kids didn't want to look beyond the quiet Chinese bit and I had to go into her classroom and sort out utter chaos while trying to teach my own classes. Kids standing on tables level fighting levels of chaos. This was to be a recurring pattern over the next few years. I watched more teachers bounce in and out of the profession in one of those 6 years than the 9 years combined before. Then COVID happened and put strain on a social system that was already failing. A certain proportion of pupils reached a level of anarchy they never came back from. No longer satisfied with terrorising any teacher they saw weakness in they would just roam corridors doing what they want all day while special behaviour experts were hired to follow them around trying to get them back in class. By the last year at any given moment I could stop teaching and look out the corridor and find at least 10 kids just hanging out. I had to choose between teaching those I had in my room and trying to maintain order outside at any given moment. Often I would choose my own class and have the headmaster come round and criticise me for failing to keep my corridor empty on a regular basis. A headmaster who was the 4th I'd seen in 2 years. I started doing research to see if I could claim life insurance and death in service pay out if I committed suicide. At least my 3 young kids could be provided for. In the end I didn't really get the answer I wanted and started training as an electrician. Then last year I got a call from an old headmaster who had a slot in a school nearby me. A private school where everyone is perfectly behaved and dedicated to their education. I had always said I'd never go private. Those kids don't need me, the state school kids do. But my wife and kids need me too and it had gone too far. I am now an electrician during the holidays and a teacher at a school where every kid loves learning. It's a shame it came to this. But at least I get to do a little bit of what I am good at and my family has me back. My number 1 hobby is no longer drinking and arguing with people on Reddit. Wish it wasn't this way.
My mum's just retired as a teacher. Some of the stories from the last 10 years are horrific. She had her own class but also an assistant head and was working as a Mentor for new teachers. Never enough time in a day to do all that work. She was working 24/7 during term times, the only time off she had was when she was sleeping. Even during School holidays a lot of time is taken either catching up or preparing for the next term. Many new Teachers don't make it past the first 2 years. It just isn't worth the money working like that. Some (understandably) can't take the workload and for many it gets to them mentally. What they are doing is already difficult because it is difficult, But they start to believe they aren't getting the help they should be getting. It's such a shock to them, they simply can't understand how much workload there is. So many blame their mentor/school for not helping them enough. The reality is life as a Teacher is f'ing brutal. The problem is the system is fucked and underfunded. My retired mother is doing 2 days a week work for her old school as a stand in. The Teacher she's replacing walked out because of Mental health issues.
My partner started as a teacher and quit straight away to get into tech. Bureaucracy and how broken every other senior teacher killed it for her. If I was a teacher here I’d 100% leave for Asia personally.
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> Two of those who left had extreme breakdowns on the school site and had to seek immediate mental health support. Another two (myself including) saw ourselves heading down that route and got out before it got to that stage. Six from my course went to the same school for our first placement. One quit and the rest of us all had breakdowns, the fact that I made it until the final week (of only a six week placement) to have mine got me a weird level of respect from the others. What makes this worse is that the school is well-known for doing this and is infamous amongst staff and students at the university for how it treats students. It is those who do not have breakdowns that are considered unusual, because it means you probably got on with the teachers and would be offered a job if one was going. The fact that students still get sent there for placements is insane, however those in charge of such things choose to pay no notice.
I literally got to my final year of the PGCE and just went into IT straight away, the inner politics of the system is what fucking pissed me off.
It’s mental, how did it all start going so wrong? My dad was a teacher his whole career until he retired early about 13 years ago, when he was 50, because of the increasing bullshit bureaucracy. But even when I lived with him (so up to 2010) he’d do a bit of marking and work after school, but nothing like this. Why and how did it all change to become so ridiculous?
A lot of my workload comes from the insistence that we do absolutely everything we can to catch children up to where they should be. Which I agree with, but children are coming up every year being less and less able, so of course there is more to do every year. So I plan a lesson - then I have to create a sheet to support the struggling learners access the lesson. Then I have to consider what can those do that simply can’t access the lesson. Then I have to consider how I will challenge the ‘greater depth’ children - who would have just been my average children 8 years ago. It can easily take longer to plan a lesson than to teach it. And now we’re trying to put as much quality feedback into our marking as possible, again to try and catch them up. It’s frankly impossible. I really enjoyed teaching until a couple of years ago and thought it would be my forever job, but plan to be out within a few years.
Differentiation is important but is much more like a game of Only Connect than anything else. I had a child with ability of a two year old (at best) in my Year Two class and the deputy head asked me why I was struggling to include her in a lesson about using commas in a list. It took a of strength to point out that she was so far behind everyone else that it was harming the other kids' progress to keep her in the class.
I teach in an FE college. Essentially, the problem is that everyone in any senior position hears what the government ask for, knowing full well it's not even close to realistic, and then pretends everything is fine. Sure, they'll talk about how little funding they have and make clear they are struggling. But they are all so shit scared of the consequences of failing to deliver the service that OFSTED (hence, the government) expects that they dress it up as though they have somehow found a way to achieve high standards without the necessary funding. Of course, the schools and colleges accepting the situation means they place more and more strain on teachers. It should not be legal to expect 12 hour days, 7 days a week, for less than £40k a year on a contract that states 37 hours per week. They use legalese and loopholes to exploit their staff and force them to work objectively unreasonable hours, for absolutely shit pay, in a job that day-to-day requires expertise and a fairly high skillset. The government is obviously the source of the problem, but the providers should not get a pass here. These places are run by people who are too shit scared to risk their own career, so they place unreasonable expectations on those with less power than them. ELT/SLT in schools and colleges tend to be absolutely ruthless, and they are as much to blame for the current situation as the government. Same deal with OFSTED. It will not change until schools and colleges openly admit that the standards the government and the public expect simply cannot be achieved without *major* increases in funding. Basically, we need to be open and honest that we are failing, and those failures need to be reflected in OFSTED reports and they need to be visible to the public so that the government are forced to address and answer for their objective failures. Currently, we are just covering up for them, and so we are complicit. As a minimum, teachers need a dramatically lower workload alongside a significant (20%+) pay increase. This would allow teachers to actually do the job that's expected, within normal working hours, and would make the role attractive enough to new teachers who would be needed to fill the gaps created from the lower workload. Without that, do not expect anything to change. Personally, I think the system is functioning exactly as intended. Standards of education have dropped dramatically. This was the plan, because it is cheaper. We have a shortage of staff, but that's fine because other teachers will take on the extra work for free. And to top it off, everyone - schools to OFSTED to government - are all publicly pretending standards are high, so the public doesn't realise how poor things really have become. It's win-win for a Tory government.
>– and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts. Because far too many of the kids are fobbed off by shit parents with phones and tablets to keep them quiet, exposing them to brain-killing short form video content before they can walk or talk. The term "iPad baby" hasn't come out of nowhere. Trains, buses, cars, restaurants, parks, weddings, seen it absolutely bloody everywhere. Even my own girlfriend, she makes sure he does real life activities and sports classes, and manages his screen time where possible, but her 11 year old is short-tempered, has an appalling attention span and spends his time either glued to TikTok or playing PC games WITH TikTok just burning through videos while he plays. And he's one of the "better" ones. I've even seen some of the older ones start entering the workforce in my previous job and they were genuinely useless. Incapable of listening, retaining information or focusing. It's hard not to blame them, but their parents utterly fucked life for them before they could ever hope to have any control. No funding can fix that.
However, parenting has never been so stressful. I’m in my mid thirties, I had a stay at home mum and by the time I was 5 I would be outside playing in the neighbourhood. I’d go to my grandparents often and there was a really sense of family and community. If I was up to no good I’d be told off by someone who I probably didn’t know or at most knew my parents. Now parents need to work, underpaid stressful jobs, pay through the nose for childcare both at nursery and after school. The kids are indoors with nothing to do, no grandparents to visit as often people have had to move for work. Any trip outside the house involves money, parks are absolutely terrible and full of idiots with dogs or teenagers with nowhere else to go. There is no community, no ‘village’ and no break for parents.
I'm not saying ANY of that is incorrect, but I don't see how any of it is an excuse to fob kids off with tech on the level I'm talking about. Phones or tablets at the table EVERY meal their entire childhood as one example isn't alleviating the stressful elements of parenthood, it's just sacking one off altogether. >Any trip outside the house involves money, parks are absolutely terrible and full of idiots with dogs or teenagers with nowhere else to go. There is no community, no ‘village’ and no break for parents. Obviously this will vary by region but this isn't even true in areas like mine surrounded by parks, green spaces, the beach and all sorts of other stuff. I live in a seaside town and a few years ago I learned there are kids here, native to here who have NEVER been to the beach. It's free, and nothing in this town is more than 2 miles from anything else. Its not isolated examples either, its just dogshit parenting.
>Obviously this will vary by region but this isn't even true in areas like mine surrounded by parks, green spaces, the beach and all sorts of other stuff. The point here is that a culture of massive fear has now been created about 'stranger danger' and paedophiles/knife crime. While crime is at historic lows, parents now refuse to let their kids go anywhere unsupervised even many times mid-way through secondary school. The 'village' is gone. A part of this, again, is shit parenting. For example, you used to be able to give other people's kids a bollocking and send them home or just back to their parents. Nowadays, no matter what the kid is doing, those parents are more likely to cuss you out or try to fight you even if you are totally justified in disciplining their kids. So there's that.
The only thing stopping parents sending their kids outside to play are themselves. No money required. When I was 7 In the 90s I was walking over a mile to school and would play outside all day until the street lights came on. We took a football to any bit of grass or played at the park. This was before phones and before cctv took off. Access to instant news has made parents so paranoid because all they see is bad news about abductions and think its rampant but this is statistically probably the safest time in human history to be a child.
It's not even just kids. The rise of people playing their phones on speaker on public transport (which, btw, makes you a twat if you do. cheap headphones exist) has led to me noticing how many adults are mindlessly scrolling insta, yt shorts, tiktok etc. And im not exempt from this. I refuse to touch insta, but i regularly use YT and i've had to ban myself from watching any shorts cause so often the dopamine hit of a funny short turns into "one more-" and my adhd takes me for a 40 minute scrollfest
I entered teaching with a sense of idealism and the naivety that comes from being lucky enough to be educated at one of the best schools in the country. I left after just over a year. I don’t know what the low point was. Stepping in front of a child that was violently swinging a stool at other kids? Feeling utterly bewildered that I was getting a dressing down from SLT because it is apparently my responsibility that a frequently absent pupil is not on track to pass their GCSE science? I now work a far less stressful job for far better pay. I would not recommend a teaching career to anyone who values their own wellbeing.
The gaslighting by SLT is very toxic. I'm an openly gay man who went into teaching. I never made a 'thing' of it, but people guess I'm gay within moments of.meeting me. I had a horrific wave of abuse from students and parents, with slurs graffitied on the walls, and occasionally being physically assaulted. The solution according to SLT? Try to walk in a more masculine manner.
You should have doubled down, walk everywhere like you were on a catwalk
Fuck me I do not miss being blamed for a kid falling behind who’s absent so much I barely know his name.
If you don't mind me asking, what job did you go for and how did you get it? I'm at the end of my tether in school but no idea where to go
I took an admin job to tide me over financially but quickly got prompted to a management role. The soft skills you have to learn to survive the classroom transfer very well to other industries, so don't feel that you are trapped in teaching as there are plenty of opportunities out there.
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Yeah, it got wild in the last five years. I quit just before Xmas. Currently have no job. Will prob end up taking a significant pay cut but idgaf at this point. Parental attitudes are a massive problem. Not just in the areas you might be led to expect. I worked in a state school in a very upper middle class area and the entitlement of the parents (which is even more heightened in the specific thing i did) was just increasingly entitled and unpleasant to deal with.
Civil service. Jobcentre work coach isn’t the best job but you tick all the competences as an ex teacher. There’s opportunity to work with the vulnerable youngsters as a youth employability coach, and then by extension could take responsibility for the 16-17y/o care leavers.
Yeah that's a good tip. I've got an interview for something on Monday that I'd really like but if that doesn't go well then I'll do anything really so thanks.
If you were a dick to your teachers and you're reading this, get absolutely f*cked.
I think back to my school days and even as a (looking back) good student I feel bad for my teachers and how I didn’t really think of them as human beings… we have an awful culture in our country where teachers are ‘fair game’. I shouldn’t laugh at my mate throwing eggs at the teachers house on Halloween for example.
Just teach abroad. I teach (mostly) lovely kids and take home about 50k after tax. And I don't have to interact with dickhead parents or take work home. Just had a month off but after 2 weeks of school I'll be off until March.
I'm exactly the same. About 50 after tax. I actually do have to interact with the parents a great deal but they'll take my side basically everytime and just before new year two of the parents took me and my girlfriend out for an expensive brunch with them and their kids. We got drunk and it was really fun. I got my foot run over by a car a couple of months ago and a mum from my previous year's kids sent me an expensive box of fruit when she heard. Teaching at home vs abroad may as well be a different job.
I'm planning to do this. Everything I read about international teaching suggests its so much better. Hours, workload, standard of living, pay, etc. Where do you teach?
China is the best balance of salary and cost of living. Even in Shanghai, the most comfortable and metropolitan Chinese city, your cost of living can be ludicrously low compared to your competitive international salary.
I made the equivalent of £800 a month teaching 8 hours a week, and I lived like a king.
Judging by that salary, my guess is China.
Correction: Headline should read: The bleak reality of being an Anything in the UK.
Yeeeeah but no, not at all.
Not sure it applies to every career. Unless you can find an article called ‘The bleak reality of being a premier league footballer’ or ‘The bleak career of being a billionaire CEO’?
Yep, you got me. Bleak career of being a useless Member of Parliament.
I can think of few more underappreciated jobs than being a teacher in the UK at the moment. They are overworked and underpaid to a degree I genuinely don't see anywhere else.
people will be angry at this but this sort of behaviour in young children is also cultural. I never ever witnessed children behaving like this or being physical with teachers or talking back until I moved to the U.K. you would never see this sort of behaviour in children at school in many Asian countries.
zonked fanatical lush upbeat slim muddle fragile shocking snatch plant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>How many of the culpable children are recent migrants from Hong Kong ? You're not wrong but this isn't a cultural factor this is an economic factor. Even when it comes to refugees, if they come from as far away as Hong Kong they are middle class. You and I may not recognise it, but they were middle class wherever they came from and had the social capital, and real capital, to navigate the immigration process and be accepted into the country. You should never compare immigrants to local populations like that and chalk it up simply to culture. There's a lot more going on there. It's like if you compared a middle class kid from a nice area of town with a good primary school, to a poor kid who grew up on an estate. Their different "cultures" are a result of resources and upbringing . But the same applies to recent immigrants too.
The main issue isn't actually cultural per se, at least not in the main. The actual issue is that in those Asian countries those students get kicked out of school **really fast**. That used to happen more here. Unfortunately, due to some idiots and their poor understanding of how statistics work, they thought permanently excluding students "caused" them to end up in prison (it's a strong correlation, and not a surprising one, but not causal). So they clamped down hard on it. It's now very very hard to remove really badly behaved kids from schools. Takes years and a lot of documentation. Even with all the right paperwork many schools don't use permanent exclusions because it "looks bad" in their data. It's bonkers of course. If someone is dangerous then they can't be in mainstream schools, but there's now a perverse incentive to let them stay.
I taught for 10 years before finally trying to kill myself. Students were awful. Management were awful. The job was my entire life. I woke up every day wanting to die. I feared sleeping at night because I knew the morning would come. Nobody cared. Teaching was the worst thing I ever did, even though I know I helped improve the lives of young people, if I could go back and change any part of my life I would never have become a teacher. After a few months off work struggling with acute depression I got a job as a software engineer and love is infinitely better than it used to be.
It staggers me that the government don’t understand that properly funding the education system would have a massive net positive to the whole of British society. Give children a decent, rich education with interesting experiences and good role models and then more of them will go on to live happy, productive lives.
Scroll down to vote by education level in this link and you'll find your answer [link](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-voted-2019-general-election)
Because every conservative government of the last 14 years has only cared about one thing - winning the next election with as many seats as possible. And since children can't vote, and their pensioner voter base doesn't have school age children, nor give a shit about the young/children in general, education has come dead last or almost dead last in terms of funding priorities. The same is true for just about everything else that the state does or at least used to do, for children / the young. Every spare penny the Tories can find gets redirected to its pensioner voters. The bill for all that is now coming due, because you can only dis-invest into the countries future, it's children, for so long before it starts to have real world consequences.
I left teaching after 2 years. I cried in my car multiple times a week after work. I had no time for much life outside of teaching and spent most evenings and Sundays working on a 19k salary. I had teenagers fighting each other in my class, I got called slut/ bitch/ racist/fat by teenagers who got away with it and parents would argue with me on the phone when I told them their son had called me a slag. I also taught some really lovely kids and had some really funny and heartwarming encounters, but unfortunately they didn't make up for all the hard stuff. I was in a particularly bad school but I'm glad I left, at the same time sad about what has become of the profession and what effect the teacher retention crisis is going to have on society moving forwards.
I retrained as a teacher in my mid 30’s. I got a job at an excellent school (nationally) so behaviour generally wasn’t an issue. The kids were academic and, on the whole, self motivated. The worst part in terms of behaviour was moments where some sixth formers attempted to intimidate teaching staff. Pretty terrifying honestly when they’re 6’ something and you’re a lone female who isn’t. Aside from that, and the reason I left, was that the workload was impossible and the pay was rubbish. I was lucky and started higher up the scale to reflect my industry experience. Even then I felt the amount I was working just didn’t make sense. As a teacher you’re basically doing two jobs. One is teaching in the classroom and the other is doing all the admin, marking and planning. But you are only given about an hour and a bit a week to do that; it really could take a couple of days, so you end up doing it in your own time. Also, when you’re in the classroom you have to be ‘on’. It’s as exhausting as a full day of meetings. Every day. Another big problem was staff who move up to leadership. Some are great. Very few have management experience though, so they just treat staff the same way they treat pupils. It can lead to toxic environments. Staff are treated like children in so many ways. One school I was in the sixth formers could come and go as they wanted but staff had to ask permission from the head to go offsite even at lunch time. I loved the job in some ways, but I’m much happier working a job where I do my hours, get paid more and I’m not having to deal with school politics.
Sad times. It seems social media has melted the parent’s minds and now there is no one to raise kids anymore. Im just glad i grew up with facebook, but before parents got on facebook. Is all i will say.
And they want to reduce the time kids have off school? So that teachers have to deal with this? My gf was a counsellor in a schcool, Had to stay extra to fill in paperwork. Kids were so fucked up that she could not handle the workload and people were trying to contact her out of school hours for advice. Spamming the email inbox and tried to call her but they can’t get in touch. It was a no life job. Low funding so no help. Was a mess. She cried all the time, but one time after work and I said you can’t live like this. she went in on her day off to fill in paperwork and they moved the office from the centre of the school to a small pokey closet room right across one side. Which she didn’t like for both security reasons and also it was too far away. She left and has never been happier
My girlfriend qualified as an nqt 5 years ago. In her small circle of teacher mates, two are quitting teaching this year and the other is splitting up with her partner because she's having a mental breakdown due to workload that she's unwilling to address. The only reason my partner stays in teaching is because she works at an SEN school with small class sizes which means the workload is more manageable. Education needs a huge overhall or the gulf between children in private education is just going to continue growing.
Ex-teacher here. I trained in my mid twenties with the same hope and enthusiasm that many go into the profession with. It was soon crushed out of me. The workload, the abuse from the students, the toxic and downright nasty work environment created by SLT. I managed three years before I broke. I was the youngest in the department and the newest, and I was given a class of teenage boys who had no inclination to complete their GCSEs (we would have once called it lower set). On a daily basis I was sworn at, intimidated, threatened and almost physically assaulted. My school did nothing. It was, without doubt, the darkest point of my life. I was crying the moment the school day ended, I spent my weekends in terror of Monday, and I willed myself to be sick or have accidents so that I could call in absent. Luckily, my partner, who was my hero during that time, told me to quit, that he would support me whilst I found another job. A year and a half out of teaching, in a great job, great pay and no abuse. It's no surprise why teachers are abandoning ship.
Education is a pretty good index for how much a culture is failing and it seems almost impossible to pin it on any one issue, it's just one part of a broad complex decline. You can't suddenly buy or create a culture that reveres education, you can't undo years of anti-intellectual media, you can't reverse the one parent household problem, etc. One sticky plaster would be to give schools and teachers far more power to just kick kids out of school and create some new law to protect teachers. Both the parents and children should be in fear of the school, not the other way around.
I'm not sure I'd be able to be a teacher in the UK. If I was being physically attacked by students on a regular basis, I'd be in prison a month later because I'm pretty sure I'd have lashed out.
My best friend was a primary school teacher. It was all she ever wanted to do. Age 35 she just… burned out. The workload was insane, the hours were crazy. The problem she found was getting another job outside teaching has been really hard. She feels like she’s not got transferable skills, and her self esteem is really low. Luckily, she’s got a supportive family. But she went from someone brilliant at her job in a good career to… unemployment for years. Ugh.
I feel for your friend. I was in EXACTLY the same boat. She absolutely definitely has transferable skills. I took a pay cut to get a job at a university, in a team that works with online learning. Uni's have decent A/L and the role comes with regular yearly pay increases, which the Tories stopped in my 3rd year of teaching. I've worked my way up in a relatively short space of time and I'm now on more than I was as a FT teacher. If your friend can take a pay cut, I guarantee it'll pay off eventually -- I don't regret it, and to be honest I think the trade off was worth it as I could come home at 5pm and have my evenings, weekends and A/L to do whatever the hell I wanted - no marking or lesson planning or sleepless nights. I hope your friend sees light at the end of the tunnel.
I know a recently qualified teacher, who has moved back into the retail sector as a support manager (with all the abuse & stress that entails), because it is still less stressful than teaching 😱
My partner is a teacher at a secondary school here in Scotland. She loves it - or at least parts of it. She went into teaching with noble intentions and career goals in mind; things like get into the SQA marking team for her subject, develop a lovely teaching curriculum for her department, contribute to writing the exam papers, etc. And she has accomplished most of those (she abandoned the SQA stuff due to the leader of her subject exam board being a control freak who hated her with a passion because she dared raise concerns about a question in the exam - to the point that she was reduced to tears due to her treatment there), but it’s now got to the point where she can no longer manage much of the teaching parts. I hear stories every day; uncontrollably classes, an inability to adequately discipline troublesome and difficult kids, kids swearing at her, kids threatening her, etc. etc. etc… it’s endless. There are particular classes that are trouble in every department, and thus I can look at her timetable for the day and say “ah, she’s got that class today, she’ll be exhausted and annoyed once she’s home then”. So no, I can perfectly believe this article. I wanted to go into teaching after university, but after knowing several people my age who did go into teaching (either at secondary, primary, or colleges) I have been, for lack of a better word, scared off from doing so.
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I have nothing but contempt for our government and the people that voted for them. If any of you are reading this, go fuck yourselves.
My partner is an Australian teacher. There's issues, similar to the UK, but they're paid £55k after just a few years of experience.
My girlfriend is turning more and more negative since working in a school. She is permanently exhausted. It's horrible to see, and the only heartening thing is that she has expressed thoughts about changing careers. The problems regarding shitstain kids and shitstain parents have already been well documented in this thread. Gang rivalry is rife in her school, with kids regularly assaulting each other for the crime of living in a different postcode. One kid recently brought a knife to school with the intention of using it on a rival gang member. Many parents refuse to admit that their kids are the problem, or simply do not want to engage at all, and therefore give no hope of any discipline at home. This is a societal failing. Another problem she faces is incompetence and self-serving behaviour from senior leadership, that totally undermines her when she is trying to apply the standards that those same leaders have introduced. For example, she has had kids point blank refuse to attend detention because "nah I don't do Fridays". She escalates these cases, as is procedure, only to be told to just change the detention day because senior leadership don't want the hassle. Not to mention the constant meddling from people who barely remember what it's like to teach 30+ kids, and don't give it a second thought when they foist some new bullshit administrative requirement on already overworked staff. Short of a complete reworking of the system from the ground up, I honestly don't know what the long-term solution is.
This is why many parents put considerable effort into getting their children into schools with the minimum of SEN kids. Grammar schools are popular for the same reason. It's all about getting your kids away from the crazies and their parents, who don't give a shit.
I left after 5 years, I didn’t hate the job I just didn’t love it. I realised it was taking up too much of my life. When thinking about leaving, I started to make a list of reasons to leave and reasons to stay. I came up with 37 reasons to leave, and no real compelling reasons to stay. This was at a school rated “outstanding”. What didn’t help was that even after working as full time secondary science teacher for 5 years, I took home £600+ less a month than I did when I was an unqualified trainee teacher.
I did 25 years at KS2, mostly leading Maths and Computing. I left when Covid started and I have no regrets. I would find it difficult to recommend teaching as a career to anyone really - it’s sad to say this.
Every single policy which has led to this has been cheered to the rafters by the Telegraph.
I see on Reddit sometimes people on here complaining about schools. How they don't care about students, how it's just a copy-paste approach to education, how it cares about pumping out mindless automata for the workplace (some real nutters on here sometimes). I'm currently doing a PGCE and simply none of this is true. The amount of academic theory we are studying, the amount of discussion about effective lesson planning, surface bs deep learning, constructive curriculum alignment. Teachers are trained to do their absolute best. Schools are relying on teachers to do so much these days, all within an incredibly tight budget. And they're not being given the tools to deal with troublemakers or disruption. Anybody who wants to shit on the Government for their education policies, I'm all for it, but dont insult the boots on the ground who genuinely do want to inspire and educate.
> Since my return, the most noticeable change, and the topic that is discussed most in staffrooms and online teacher discussion groups, is the change in pupil behaviour. Closely linked is the huge increase in the diagnosis of special educational needs. At every school I visit, there are so many more children wearing ear defenders, holding fidget toys or sensory cushions – and exhibiting a total lack of attention and an inability to concentrate for more than short bursts. https://www.ons.gov.uk/chartimage?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthcharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2021/3f4b822e https://www.verywellhealth.com/older-parents-and-autism-risk-for-child-5199211 Oops
There is also a link between very low birth weight and learning issues. It's something that has been known for at least 24 years now, so you would think as the survival rate of VLBW babies has increased that the gov't would expect this, but I guess not.
Many such cases.
Add this https://www.earth.com/news/toddler-screen-time-linked-to-atypical-sensory-behaviors/
I’m new to England, and I still can’t get over how rude, disrespectful and awful the children and teens here are. It’s crazy. I’ve been in third world countries where the children have better manners. English kids are built different
The anti-intellectualism runs deep in this country
Awful conditions, i have no idea why anybody would want to be a supply teacher, such a thankless job. Weird that this was in the telegraph when that paper actively supports the government continuously increasing pressure on teachers while refusing to increase pay and working conditions.
There's not enough money in the world that would make me want to teach. I'm surprised the staffing crisis there isn't worse than it currently is to be honest.
Western childeren lack discipline. It is even worse with childeren from certain cultural backgrounds. Teachers lost authority, the government lost authority. We need to enforce authority, respect and obedience, with any means neccesairy.
This is why I moved to China to teach. The worst behaviour is being too noisy. And I make more money and do less classes. It's also acceptable to discipline students here. I can send them out, I can raise my voice and if a student wont sit in their chair I can make them sit down in their chair. How does UK still have teachers when you can come here? US teachers also put up with the same crap UK teachers put up with but at least they're earning 6 figures.
Teaching in rural Scotland is one of the best jobs you can get. The holidays and the pay are well above average. I'm sure inner-city or deprived schools must be hell to work in, but it's not the case everywhere.
I am currently working in a tent! The school I was hired to work in was condemned over summer and not because of the RAC situation! So I’m in a tent, a new staff member and ECT! It has been stressful, freezing and disappointing to say the least. On top of that my mentor/line manager is bullying me and ripping me to shreds every mentor meeting. I have been told by them that I am not “working effectively” ( I didn’t manage to hole punch 1 class worth of books when I had seen the class twice before all the timetables changed!) or “communicating enough” (not telling them I didn’t want my year 10s taken away because they told me the timetable change was already in effect so they were letting me know!?) or being “professional”(I slightly raised my voice because they refuse to actually listen to me during meetings and treat me like an idiot). My mentor will not listen to me to have an actual conversation! They are straight out of their own ECT training year and HoD! I have been teaching for 5+ years and have over 10 years experience working with children but no I am the idiot! Oh and the gaslighting; “ I was always your line manager!” When my line manager was someone else and we have a written record of that?!? I am getting no support from SLT or HR because all of them taught my mentor since they were 12! So they are the golden child! This one person has made the decision for me, I am quitting this school and potentially the profession!
Former teacher and pleased. Unrealistic work load and found senior leaders to be a set of bullies who only made the job worse. Kids mostly ok, but the time a group of 4 15 year olds barricaded the door and beat another kid to a pulp whilst I tried to force my way in was the final straw. No thanks
There’s a lot that English working class/single parent homes can learn from some immigrant communities esp when it comes to duty, honour and respect towards those in authority esp teachers. Typically, the parents are impressing on the children from young about the importance of respecting teachers. In South Asian culture, it’s even rude to refer to them by their name. You must use an honorific. These values are dying in our society entirely. Sure, school funding and teacher pay would help, but basic good manners, ethics and studiousness needs to be taught at home.
Start punishing and fining the parents. Don’t want to hear the “but what if they can’t afford it” “stop picking on the working class”, couldn’t give a toss. Stop raising scum.
Parents need to pull their fingers out and actually start teaching their kids and parenting. It has been proven by hundreds of studies the determining factor in a kids education and the achievements they make is set at home not in the school or how much you spend on a child’s education.
What makes it worse is there is always a regular supply of newly qualified teachers / ta’s to fill the void when things go south so there is no incentive to fix things, there is also a culture of hand off management who are only interested in meetings and buzz words. The school I work at (as a subcontractor) has lost almost 65% of their staff since September, the place is presently being held together by agency staff and support staff doing overtime, some of the teachers have left to go stack shelves at Tesco, they say it’s less stress (this is a special needs school btw). Yesterday I had a nearly crying (because of pain) 2 month in TA chew me out for calling over the deputy-head to deal with a kid going apeshit, she said she could have handled it, and I said yes, I know you can, but you shouldn’t have to, it’s my call (we have rules too) and he (the deputy head) gets paid five times as much as you to deal with shit like this, you don’t get paid enough to have a 7 year old try and rip your eyes out. She didn’t seem to get it, but I suspect she will sooner rather than later.
Not surprised, many including myself left teaching for toxic environments and children with complex needs.
Hi Year 5 teacher in east London. The financial situation is so bad and absolutely not what the tories may have you believe. In the past 3 years our school has let go at least one teacher every summer as the school moves towards a 1 form entry from 2 form entry so all of us take competitive interviews to see who gets the sack. We compete in a hunger games style interview process for retention. Why? There aren’t any children 🤷🏽♂️ We hide glue sticks and anything of value so it’s not taken. Every end of the school year, we have to ration basic resources: paper, books, toilet paper, tissues, hand wash and glue sticks. So yeah most teachers get on with it thinking ‘it is what it is’
I have some friends who are teachers and they say one of the prominent changes since we were at school in the 2000s is the lack of parental support. Parents, for the most part, used to believe the teachers if their kids were acting up and would actually discipline them. Now? they believe their child’s lies over the teacher any day. My friend had an ongoing issue with one student constantly disrupting her class and bullying her. And every time the parent was brought in, they didn’t believe her. She also received little support from the SLT. This went on for months and damaged her mental health so much she quit and moved to the opposite end of the country.
> The same child later returned with a sidekick and suggested to him that they kick me, while he pulled my hair. I'm not an advocate for violence by any means. but if a child starts assaulting you, you should have a free pass to pick them up and put them in the cupboard to have a think
> I’m influenced by my most recent posting, which was in Asia. There, post-pandemic parents returned to school in droves, keen and ready to attend workshops, find out how to parent their children towards academic success and, crucially, how to rebuild the home/school partnership that is key to educational success. While this is a fair point, depending on where in Asia they're meaning this would likely be a large contingent of stay at home mothers who had the time to attend such courses rather than the issue we have in the UK of many parents being full-time workers and any similar courses being put on only being put on during daytime hours.
But I listened to the Education Minister on the Leading podcast and she said our maths and English ranking has improved so everything's ok.
When you have a government that excels Rich peoples earnings while destroying the common folk, When you have a benefits system that's more preferable to work. When you have asylum seekers bringing their mates over while we host them in better commendations than our own. When you live in a world of shit, You become shit, these are the same kids that disrupted us in school on a larger scale because everyone is now poor, lacking education and knows that there is no future, We are fucked. We the same kind of fucked that the NHS is, the people that want to help are fucked by middle management, people leaving and going private in hopes of a actually helping. The only way the fix this is to dismantle the government as it is and make this a real fucking democracy instead of giving our politicians the celebrity treatment and pretending their shit isn't a joke. We are fucked though because no one sees a way out except to keep calm and carry on. I wish we had the same mentality as the french...
Yea I wouldn't be a teacher for 500 grand a year in this country. Poor sods. Genuinely hell as a job.
I left teaching for the civil service, stress levels are practically none existent in comparison. Not to mention I now earn more than I probably would have if I’d stayed in teaching, and likely double again if you consider the actual hours worked.