Untangling The Teacher Recruitment And Retention Crisis – “I Sobbed As I Said Goodbye To My Career”
Unravelling the complex strands that are leading to a teacher recruitment and retention crisis might require drastic action, suggests Julie Murray, but surely we have to try?
- by Julie Murray
I sobbed as I said goodbye to my nine-year teaching career in 2014. Sometimes I get pangs – in hindsight I was hitting a planning stride, my intuition was better tuned and I loved seeing Year 7s blossom into Year 13s.
But whenever I consider returning to the exhilarating, exhausting grind of teaching, it looks like intensely knotted yarn. In amongst it I could untie each entanglement in turn, but from here the detangling appears insurmountable.
The recruitment and retention crisis begs the question, what on earth should change? The reviews, reports and promises to cut teacher workload seem rather like sticking a plaster on a broken limb. A more drastic solution is needed to untangle the two most peculiarly education-related knots.
All or nothing
The first of these is marking. Oft disputed, but when a new marking policy of regular, targeted and reacted to feedback was introduced in school, I set to it diligently, and do you know what, it worked. Understanding and results improved, and an inspector even told me to ‘keep it up’. But keeping it up was killing me.
After teaching, detentions, meetings, tracking and planning, I lugged marking home most nights and weekends. I hoped SLT would exclaim ‘this is unsustainable, let us help’. They didn’t. And why would they? The hours spent genuinely seemed to be helping the students.
The second knot is my non-teaching husband’s fault. I had marking, he had total liberty. If he had the temerity to talk to me in the midst of it he might get yelling, crying, or blank staring. But come summer when he was working, I’d have gone feral – exploring the freezer for the fourth week and deciding that hash brown broad bean surprise was perfectly acceptable. Is this issue work-life balance? Perhaps – but my workload per se wasn’t a problem; that a year’s work was squeezed into 39 weeks was. The rollercoaster of absolutely all during term or nothing in holiday detox was disheartening.
These two problems made me leave teaching. What solution would support current teachers better, and persuade others to return or enlist?
My answer is to restructure the school calendar. Reduce daily hours of teaching and spread actual working hours throughout the year. Redistribute the summer holiday to create shorter terms. Some find this anathema, with good reason – teachers who relish the summer and working parents who need childcare.
But of all the reviews in education, a serious and dispassionate consideration of the school calendar has never seemed to be one. Scaremongering accompanying academies or braying about the archaic summer holiday is as far as we’ve got.
Better balance, improved outcomes
Just think what this would solve though. Working from nine to one in the classroom, teachers might have a fighting chance of completing all their required tasks within regular hours. With students off site, more of the quality time needed to mark so that it has an impact would be possible.
Terms wouldn’t feel like ‘going down in a sub’ – submerged for seven weeks. With manageable days and terms teachers’ well-being would improve – no more living for Saturday, or the next summer holiday. Of an evening they could have a conversation, or read a book, or just vegetate because it was a shocker of a day.
With time for teachers to become familiar with and implement curriculum change thoroughly, student progress would be better served. Learning would be continuous and consolidated – no more all or nothing.
Certainly this proposal would cause widespread upheaval to, well, everyone; I’m not blind to its radicalism. But for all the knots multiplying, tightening, strangling… we need to investigate any avenue which might lead to an untangling.
Julie Murray is an ex-head of history and politics.
