Dilapidated school buildings, excessive workloads, and inadequate pay – this, says Dr Mary Bousted, is how we as a society treat our teaching and school staff in 2023. And it's now so bad that even Ofsted is passing comment...

 

The educational crisis caused by the chronic teacher shortage was the main topic of Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman’s latest annual report.

To use a cliché, I have never read anything like it.

The report is testimony to a decade of neglect of education and children’s services. It documents shocking evidence of:

Children’s social care is in crisis, with a chronic absence of children’s social workers who, the chief inspector reports, are over-worked, with stress and pressure increasing as their caseloads grow larger, because local authorities cannot recruit and retain them.

Indeed, the use of agency social workers, meeting at-risk and vulnerable children and young people on Zoom, is increasing, with all that entails for quality of care, personal knowledge of the child and of the area they live in.

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