In recent years, it seems we have become stuck in a state of permacrisis. Headlines are dominated by the cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis, the climate crisis, the mental health crisis, the small boats crisis, the housing crisis, the student loan crisis, the social care crisis, the maternity care crisis and so on.
It’s easy to feel ‘crisis fatigue’: a sense of exhaustion, burnout and apathy from all this prolonged adversity. After all, in the last decade, we have endured Brexit; Covid; wars in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran; seven different prime ministers; skyrocketing interest rates; record levels of debt; record illegal immigration; and now record numbers of disillusioned young people not in education, training or employment. It’s easy to feel defeatist against this backdrop of negativity: yes, yes, I know things are really bad, but what can we really do?
For all of these reasons I hesitate to call what is happening in teacher recruitment yet another ‘crisis’, especially when it lacks the urgency or danger of other, more pressing domestic and geopolitical matters. Ultimately, no matter how bad things get, school classrooms won’t sit empty: classes can be merged, class sizes can grow, and pupils can be taught by teaching assistants, cover staff and other non-specialists. Of course, these compromises impact teaching and learning, but they also allow politicians to ignore the scale of the problem. Institutional denial has now become a long-term habit rather than a short-term necessity.
Nearly half of teachers are planning to quit the profession in the next five years
Yet we should also not underestimate the pressures schools are under. New research by the Liberal Democrats suggests that nearly half of teachers are planning to quit the profession in the next five years. The government has missed its secondary teacher recruitment target for the last 11 out of 12 years, despite lowering its ambitions. Over a third of those who qualified to teach in the past decade have left the profession; teacher vacancies are at a record high; and even the most prestigious schools are ‘reluctantly appointing’ – hiring candidates they would never normally consider. Otherwise there would literally be nobody to teach A-level Chemistry next year.
This is a problem for every stage – and every demographic – in the profession. We aren’t training enough teachers in the first place: even the behemoth Teach First is struggling to meet recruitment targets, despite record numbers of requests for staff in disadvantaged schools. Record numbers of graduates who do qualify never actually go on to work in a state school.
Women in their thirties are, numerically, the single biggest group leaving teaching, both as a result of poor work-life balance (teachers report working on average 52 hours a week, which is hardly an advert for a supposedly ‘family-friendly’ profession), but also poor maternity pay. For context, most teachers get four weeks at full pay, two weeks at 90 per cent pay, followed by 12 weeks of half pay before going onto statutory pay. By comparison, civil servants in the Department of Education, the very people introducing these policies, receive 28 weeks’ full pay.
There is also now a worrying gender imbalance in teaching: one in three primary schools and one in four secondary schools do not have a male classroom teacher, which means that nearly a million children have no male role model in an education setting. This ‘male exodus’ is a worsening situation: there are fewer male teachers than female in every single age cohort, but the proportions become more skewed as you go down the age bands (only around 19 per cent of teachers under the age of 25 are male), whilst the percentage of male teachers in secondary schools has fallen every year since 2010. There also seems to be an interesting correlation between the number of male teachers and pupil performance. Inner London schools, which have the most male teachers, outperform every other region in the country; on the other hand, men are least likely to go into teaching in schools in the North East, which has the worst GCSE results in the UK.
The problem is that politicians have no idea how to address this problem. Various governments have tried throwing some money at the issue: the Tories increased starting salaries to £30,000 while Labour, rather uninspiringly, promised to give a ‘golden hello’ of £2,400 to teachers who completed two years of training. This particular crisis continues to go overlooked and unaddressed: the current government has no idea how to recruit its promised 6,500 teachers over five years (a pitifully small number given that around 40,000 teachers leave the profession each year) and politicians instead continue to squabble about decolonising the curriculum rather than the fact that a quarter of schools currently do not have a dedicated Physics teacher. Teacher recruitment has been too low down the list for too long, and it is high time it was prioritised before we have an even more serious crisis on our hands.
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