Miami Mortgage News

Teachers are now expected to be social workers

We need to sort out workload, assessment reform and endless political meddling if we're going to ease the teacher recruitment crisis, writes one teacher trainerThe Department for Education (DfE) is, at last, recognising that there is a teacher recruitment crisis. Providers of teacher training can now, without penalty, recruit up to 25 per cent more than their target number.Good news - or at least it would be if we had top-class graduates hammering at the door waiting to be let in. The problem is, you can’t recruit from a poor or non-existent pool. Mathematically, 25 per cent of nothing is, well, nothing.The crisis in recruitment and retention is not new. For years, teacher recruitment has been in decline. Targets for key subjects such as physics, maths or foreign languages have been missed consistently for the past six years.Why is teaching now a turn-off?The DfE response from Gove to Greening has been to dismiss any notion of a problem or crisis and simply trot out vacuous statements on quality and numbers (while ignoring the increasing numbers of pupils needing teachers).At the heart of the crisis is the question of why, in an economically difficult and politically turbulent time, is teaching so unattractive? When I started in initial teacher training (ITT) 20 years ago, a recession or tough economic times saw an increase in numbers of applicants for ITT.It was a safe job (for life for the good teachers), with reasonable pay and a good pension that ranked as one of the best bar the civil service. In difficult economic times, who wouldn’t want such a job?Today, it’s clear that the years of turmoil over curriculum and exam reform, the major - and, for the most part, ineffective - structural reform, turning schools into academies and the failure to tackle workload has turned an attractive profession into an unattractive job.