Lucy Kellaway loves teaching. She came to it remarkably late, deciding to retrain at 58 after a long career in financial journalism, but is so evangelical about the switch that she set up a charity to help others do the same. Now Teach has since supported more than 800 people into the classroom, many leaving lucrative careers in banking or law and disproportionately entering areas of desperate shortage, such as science and maths. Though still a relatively tiny drop in the educational ocean, the scheme was growing, with expressions of interest among over-50s up 52% last year. But perhaps its real value, amid a relentless barrage of offputting stories from the chalkface, is that its optimistic stories of midlife reinvention caught the imagination of people seeking more meaning in their working lives, making teaching sound like an aspirational and emotionally rewarding thing to do.
Well, not any more. After the Department for Education abruptly scrapped its grant, this September’s intake will be Now Teach’s last unless a solution can be found. Another bright spot snuffed out, rounding out what has been a very dark week for veteran teachers clinging on by their fingernails to a career that they, too, once used to love.
Schools across the country were still absorbing the distressing news that two teachers and a pupil had been stabbed at a Carmarthenshire comprehensive when the government delivered a further blow to morale by announcing last week that it will not, after all, be heeding calls to ease the stress surrounding Ofsted inspections by scrapping the one-word headline judgments that can damn a school overnight. (The prospect of reform had been dangled by recommendations from the cross-party education select committee, after the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, who killed herself after her primary school was downgraded to “inadequate”.) More hope dashed, for a profession that doesn’t have that much left.
Every year, roughly one in 10 teachers leaves a career that isn’t drawing in nearly enough new recruits to replace them. In physics, the worst-hit subject, recruitment fell 83% short of the government’s target: across secondary schools generally, it was 50% short. A third of newly qualified teachers leave in their first five years, while (according to the survey app TeacherTapp) fewer than two-thirds of staff overall reckon they’ll still be teaching in three years’ time. A long-simmering recruitment and retention crisis is now approaching boiling point, with heads tearing their hair out over filling vacancies even in highly desirable schools. Meanwhile the chances of hiring, say, a physics teacher with an actual physics degree in a tough neighbourhood outside London are “almost zero”, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Dr Luke Sibieta told a recent parliamentary inquiry into teacher recruitment.
Some schools are resorting to what is delicately termed “reluctantly appointing”, which means hiring candidates you’d never normally consider, because otherwise there will be literally nobody to teach A-level chemistry next year. Others are relying heavily on teaching assistants, who were never meant to lead classes on their own except in an emergency, but are increasingly being chucked in at the deep end. (A recent Unison survey found two in five of its members were covering for regular teachers at least five hours a week.) Some schools muddle through by poaching trained teachers from abroad, or combining multiple classes under one teacher in the hall, or turning what was once lesson time into a kind of supervised study, where students read textbooks or do worksheets under the eye of someone who isn’t qualified to teach the syllabus properly. Hovering in the wings, meanwhile, are AI companies keen to pitch their chatbots as a miracle cure for teacher shortages – ironically just as many anxious parents are revolting against the idea of ever more screen-based childhoods.
In surveys about why teachers have fallen out of love with teaching, workload invariably tops the list. (Forget the tired old myths about endless holidays: 70% of Now Teach’s graduates said they found the workload higher in the classroom than in what were often demanding previous careers.) It’s not just the hours but the sheer intensity of it, the heavy responsibility of working with sometimes vulnerable children, and the feeling of battling social problems that you can do very little about but are still somehow expected to solve while simultaneously teaching bored 14-year-olds Shakespeare.
But other common complaints include deteriorating pupil behaviour, fear of Ofsted, experienced staff not being able to use their own judgment, and of course pay. Though teachers fought for and won a raise earlier this year, the DfE had to raid existing budgets to fund it – a strategy of robbing Peter to pay Paul that Kellaway blames for the shortsighted cut to Now Teach.
Easing the pressure of Ofsted inspections is arguably the cheapest and quickest way to make teachers feel that someone is listening, and help stem the exodus. Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has duly pledged to ditch the one-word report verdicts – from “outstanding” to “inadequate” – that heads argue are an unfairly crude way of summing up a school, in favour of something more like a report card. (Ofsted’s Welsh equivalent, Estyn, has already done something similar, while retaining the ability to put a failing school into special measures.) Beyond that, Phillipson’s team is looking at quick early wins to ease teachers’ workload. But tackling the disruption, abuse and lack of respect in class that grinds many teachers down is going to be a knottier task.
Though bitter theological disputes rage between teachers about how best to manage it, most agree that behaviour in schools is getting worse – almost nine in 10 NASUWT union members surveyed last autumn felt violence was rising – and that it’s invariably affected by life beyond the classroom. Teachers are at the sharp end of a post-pandemic teenage mental health crisis that has overwhelmed NHS services, of the knock-on effects of poverty, insecure housing and in some neighbourhoods gang crime, and sometimes too of dysfunctional parenting.
Though it’s promised free breakfast clubs and more mental health counselling in schools, Labour still lacks the kind of joined-up, Sure Start-style thinking about children’s lives that aims to tackle all these interlaced problems together. It needs to make one more leap of imagination, before more schools are faced with the scenario that many have started to dread: a September where there are just no new teachers to be had, for love nor money. For some, that may already be closer than we think.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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