Where have all the teachers gone? Classroom brain drain as Britons lured abroad
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/more-money-less-hassle-teachers-are-ditching-britain-to-work-abroad-xtt3klw3r
Posted by Low_Map4314
Where have all the teachers gone? Classroom brain drain as Britons lured abroad
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/more-money-less-hassle-teachers-are-ditching-britain-to-work-abroad-xtt3klw3r
Posted by Low_Map4314
30 Comments
They fucked off because of shit pay, shit conditions and teach more and more kids per class.
They misspelt “Were pushed out by constantly increasing pressure combined with inadequate pay”
And why ? Because teachers are treated like crap. I worked overseas and loved it but came back to get further qualifications ; out of curiosity I applied for jobs here (I teach a core subject) and never received a invite for interview – the reason I suspect was my age. They’ve kicked older teachers out (ageism is rampant) and the young ones are leaving.
When you can earn more money, pay no tax and experience less stress, all while living in a warm climate, why would you stay in the UK?
Where have the teachers gone? Well successive UK governments, endorsed by newspapers like the Times, have implemented economic policies which have resulted in real terms funding of the education sector being slashed. Then the Times, instead of reflecting on the results of the economic policies they supported and continue to support, put out articles like this with quotes insisting it’s because young people ‘want an easy life’ or whatever.
> Salaries are often higher, and packages can include accommodation, cars and gym membership. A newly qualified teacher in the Australian state of New South Wales, for instance, earns the equivalent of £49,500, compared with a starting salary in the UK of £30,000. Some schools even pay your airfare.
>…
> In Dubai, his salary is tax-free. With an £18,000 annual housing allowance, his package in his new job in the Emirates, as founder of a sixth form for Arcadia School, is in six figures, more than double what he was earning when he left.
Well, there’s your problem, pay them more and they’ll be less likely to move abroad to teach. We treat our teachers like glamorous babysitters and pay them as such.
Like most sectors in the UK, work and life is more appealing elsewhere. This isn’t just a teacher thing lol.
Long hours, mediocre pay, growing class sizes, growing youth mental health crisis, get blamed by the government and the media for everything wrong, too many parents being unsupportive 90% of the time yet quick to shout and complain or even get aggressive when it suits them, harassment by the kids…
Who wouldn’t leave that for better money or better quality of life elsewhere?
Yet this is once again delivered with a ‘young people don’t like hard work’ angle rather than questioning why we expect young teachers to just put up with crap conditions.
When you can earn more with zero education and no degree, thats when the lower payed salary workers leave.
They got sick of raising the illiterate spawn of ignorant scum that consistently vote against their own interests, whilst expecting them to toilet train and feed the children with their own money.
Until the overwhelming amount of scum in the UK can shoulder any form of social responsibility, this country will continue to fail, regardless of who’s in power.
There are a lot of experienced teachers leaving the profession. The constant drive to hit targets with a student population that struggles with respect and discipline, coupled with a lack of support from parents. It takes a village to raise a child, it’s not all on the teachers alone.
The starting pay for a teaching job is absolutely horrendous compared with what they have to put up with. I work in cybersecurity, and an entry level graduate job with very little stress, very little actual responsibility and no post-grad requirements is around the same salary.
Pay teachers more, for fucks sake.
When I left uni I had two career paths in mind, teaching or going into the industry I studied in.
Did a year of volunteering in multiple schools before looking at doing PGCE.
Couldn’t find one happy teacher. Every single one was beaten down, tired and just fed up with the whole teaching industry. In the class room they would come alive and they had such a good relationship with the kids but fuck me the teachers room was grim. Every single one of them had a plan to get out.
If that wasn’t the last nail in the coffin, the pay was. Looked at what I’d be earning over the next few years and thought there’s no way any of this is worth it
I was on par money wise for a while, then after about 3-4 years I was making far more than my teacher friends. While my industry comes with its own stresses, it wasn’t on par with the never ending bollocks of teaching.
Treated like a third parent, expected to treat the job like your number one hobby outside of work and get paid like mugs.
Ah yes, teach/become a free babysitter to a class of little shits who do what they want with no consequences, spend your break stopping fights, then go home to try and figure out where the hell to get enough art supplies to actually maybe give the one or two you think might care a bit of fun.
Underpaid, underappreciated, and increasingly subject to violence that is absolutely not dealt with. Legitimately better off doing pretty much anything else, that at least ends when you get home.
Shit pay, terrible conditions, feral children. We’ve been suffering brain drain much longer than this, it’s almost as if sensible people don’t want to live in a country who’s future is a brazilian favela.
I looked at retraining and doing a PGCE and becoming a teacher. Then I checked the wages.
Then, after about 30 seconds decided to become a heating engineer instead
Teachers have quit because of awful pay, massive classrooms, huge amounts of work outside the classroom and completely uncontrollable undisciplined children.
Where have all the teachers gone? where have all the nurses gone? where have all the doctors gone? where have all the scientists gone?
My mum retired 2 years ago from Primary Teaching, since last Summer she’s been working 2 days a week because her old School is so short staffed.
The class she is taking ***HAVENT HAD A PERMANENT TEACHER ALL YEAR!!!*** they have only had different supply teachers…
The original Teacher walked out because she couldn’t cope, she quit the profession. The second teacher they got is on sick leave for stress/anxiety mental health issues. All support for Teachers was hacked away from them after 2010, class sizes are too big, they have kids with difficulties and nowhere to place them, because classroom assistants and support units all cut. A Teacher is thrown in and its sink or swim. Even experienced Teachers are struggling.
It is literally hell to be a Teacher. Even when times where better it was hard to be a Teacher, people shit on them for “THEY GET TOO MANY HOLIDAYS!!” My mum spent nearly all her Holidays catching up and then preparing for the next term. During term times, she worked from 7am till 10pm at night, because the workload was so full on. Her job consumed her life, and she was a good teacher with lots of experience…
Most new Teachers are getting qualified and being given a job placement, then once they start it hits them like a truck… their life changes into one that has no time for anything other than working.
While pay is an issue its not the only issue which has pushed people over the edge. My brother trained as a physics teacher here. He left for Thailand to teach in an international school and will likely never return. We desperately need more maths and physics teachers but its hard to keep them.
He says the main reason is the behaviour of parents and children. 40 years ago teaching used to be a reasonably respectable career for the few who went to university, parents tended to side with teachers over their own children and teachers had authority over kids. Behaviour was still an issue but teachers had more capability to address it and parents helped.
The loss of respect of the profession and the inability to make changes in kids lives because parents are actively hostile to educators can make the job unpleasant.
The alternative of teaching kids who come from a more strict parental background, who talk back far less, follow basic instructions and just let their teachers teach, is phenomenal. He fell in love with teaching again, being able to make fun experiments, get kids questioning why on everything and generally opening their minds. He raves about how its so much easier to help kids learn and achieve when there’s no disruption or any disruption is quickly solved with a single word.
Here a fun lesson can become chaos as rules and boundaries are things to be pushed as “kids are kids”. We’re protecting a few kids from punishments so we end up making teacher’s lives so miserable they leave the country. Some responses to the above I’ve heard have been “he shouldn’t have been a teacher anyway if he couldn’t handle it”. Its just sad that we value poor behaviour as something to be coddled, it ruins the kid’s lives and pushes teachers away.
There’s no policy change or governmental programme which will fix this issue. It’s entirely a cultural one that we are collectively to blame for.
Like the article says, and pretty much exactly has happened to every single “professional-vocational” type of role in this country which is in any way connected to public funding, the working conditions have become basically unbearable, while the pay you’re expected to take is getting to a point where a move overseas will see your income near enough double, in some cases even more. Gee, I wonder why this is happening. And this is totally ignoring the fact you’ve also spent at this point a pretty significant chunk of your working career living in an environment where the government seems to repeatedly want to paint you as some kind of target. Huge numbers of people are long past the goodwill stage now, and the pipeline of those who might’ve previously been attracted by a decently middle class career can now see it provides nothing of the sort and instead seems to demand a kind of low-level masochism from the workforce.
A few things the non teachers have missed:
1. The government have clearly shifted to a model of teacher recruitment over retention. This is coupled with the deprofessionalisation of the industry from a career into a 4-5 year work placement before moving on to something else means a lot of institutional knowledge and excellent teachers are lost.
2. The changing nature of work in other industries. Teachers can’t work from home and rarely have options for proper flexible working. When salaries are comparable or better elsewhere it is no wonder most capable teachers are off.
3. The immense problems of society we have to try to fix might be made easier if we had time allocated to actually do all the parts of our jobs which aren’t standing in front of a class. We have some of the worst ppa allocations going.
4. Government and their media buddies constantly shitting on our unions for asking pay at least kept up with inflation (spoiler alert, it hasn’t) and fund schools.
5. Being caught in the middle of culture wars, massive commercial multi academy trusts, overpromoted leadership who treat staff like children and the needs of struggling or disinterested parents.
I am very much in the profession for the opportunities to support young people, however I am also lucky to be in a very unique school. If I was in a normal school I probably would have fled like the majority of my peers who I did my initial teacher training with.
Yes because most secondary schools are literally zoos. Behaviour is completely off the scale, kids do not give a shit and wreck the place teachers are treated like dirt and there is zero support from Management.
This BBC article might give you a clue as to what the problem is: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1ddegp8zvo)
Oh yes and wasn’t the Times one of those papers that warned us of the chaos that would happen if Ed Miliband became PM in 2015?
Option 1: Complete a teacher training qualification and possibly a degree on top of that if you needed to convert. Work 60+ hours a week in a highly stressful role where you potentially face violence and abuse daily. 30k starting Salary.
Option 2: Manager at ASDA stacking shelves for 26k a year. No qualifications required.
What a fucking conundrum.
Shit pay, shit conditions, huge classroom sizes, lots of children with language barriers, unruly and violent children. Who would have thought?
This is what annoys me about people, and particularly the government, getting pissy about teachers and NHS staff striking.
These are the people who are fighting to stay in the public sector and get vilified for it, yet the ones that move to the private sector and abroad aren’t subjected to the same abuse.
My teacher friend earns in a week in Australia what she earns in a month in the UK.
Just speculating, but in addition to the deteriorating work conditions and poor pay…
As the UK universities increasingly rely on foreign students tuition fees to survive, UK students who are at all social will get wider and wider international networks and information about conditions in other nations.
What if more pensioners came out of retirement in order to teach? Since they are old, presumably this would result in a decrease in wokeness in schools?