In a recent survey, we asked senior leaders in English state schools which factors would prompt them to consider leaving the teaching profession.
The most common response was exhaustion and fatigue (68%), followed by unsustainable workload and working hours (67%). I am sure that, alongside pay, many classroom teachers would say something similar because of the pressures that plague the education system.
These pressures are, of course, chronic underfunding – with demands on schools far exceeding the affordable level of staffing – persistent staff shortages, and a punitive regime of inspections and performance tables which drives stress and anxiety.
But it is another common response to this survey question that I am going to focus on in this article – the lack of recognition and respect from the government, which 57% of respondents cited as a factor which prompted them to consider leaving the profession.
This is a terrible indictment on the government’s treatment of the education sector. It literally costs the government nothing to show the teaching profession recognition and respect, but it cannot even manage to do this.
Normally, this is not so much what they say, but what they do. They issue platitudes thanking leaders and teachers for their hard work, but this is not matched by their actions.
During the Covid pandemic, there were particularly egregious examples, such as threatening schools with legal action if they switched to online learning amid soaring infections ahead of Christmas.
But government policy almost always shows a lack of trust which is insulting. It is this attitude which drives the industry of inspections, performance tables, and the strings which are attached to virtually every initiative. For a government that likes to talk about cutting red tape, it certainly knows how to create lots of the stuff.
Now, however, the new education secretary does not even seem that bothered about the platitudes either.
In a speech to the recent Conservative Party annual conference, in virtually his first public statement since becoming education secretary, Kit Malthouse said: “On schools, we want to be much more assertive about intervention and standards – looking for excellence in the basics: attendance, behaviour, reading, writing, maths.
“And that means we need to be much more front-footed on talking to schools about what they can achieve.”
He continued: “We need to reflect on the fact that there is nothing quite as persistent as people hanging on to mediocrity. Working with teachers, bringing all schools up to the standard of the best will be a key part of our mission.”
So, there we have it. A government that thinks its role is to be assertive with schools, intervening to tell them how to do things properly, and stop people “hanging on to mediocrity”.
A government that thinks if schools tried a bit harder then they’d do better. A government that thinks policy-makers – despite for the most part never having worked in a school – know how to run them better than educators.
We wrote to Mr Malthouse to say how appalled we were at his comments. In our letter, which you can read in full here, we quoted our survey findings on why leaders were considering leaving the profession, and concluded: “Self-evidently, this is not a problem to which the answer is ‘more pressure from government’. Rather than raising the stakes even higher and taking cheap shots at a profession already on its knees, your department should be moving heaven and earth to provide schools and colleges with the funding they need to keep their doors open, the support they need to provide education and care to children and young people with increasingly complex needs, and a functioning pipeline of teachers to staff their organisations. Anything else is mere posturing.”
Following that furore, I see the education secretary tweeted this thought for the day: “The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.” (Warren Bennis).
Let’s hope Mr Malthouse means that he is going to step up to challenge the status quo of government underfunding, missed recruitment targets, an overburdened accountability system, and cheap denigration of the teaching profession.
In the meantime, to you – the people on the frontline working your guts out on behalf of young people and their communities – we salute you.
You deserve better.
- Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. Read his previous articles for SecEd, via http://bit.ly/seced-barton