Why are older teachers being pushed out of the profession?
Older teachers are being bullied out of the profession, according to NASUWT. Maybe it’s age-old ageism, or just all about the money, asks Kevin Harcombe…
Comedian Alexei Sayle (aged 67) restated the comforting aphorism of ‘age is just a number’, before memorably adding, “A number signifying rapid and terrifying physical and mental decay.”
It seems that some headteachers agree with him and are trying to bully allegedly decrepit older teachers out of their schools – at least according to Chris Keates of NASUWT.
One man’s bullying, however, is another man’s capability procedure – there will be some older teachers who are simply not up to the demands of the job any more but, equally, others will be as effective as the brightest, most bushy-tailed NQT.
Reasons for getting rid of older staff include their “dislike for new ideas… and a feeling that their own ideas are the best”.
Furthermore, they look past it, being, “careless of their appearance and this does not appeal to children”.
Those quotations are not from a particularly vicious recent Ofsted report but are taken from a study, Pedagogical Seminary, published over a century ago – so not much has changed in ageism in a hundred years.
The study, a response to questionnaires (who knew they had irritating questionnaires at the end of World War I?), added that “continuous teaching has ill effects on health and temper and tends to develop inelasticity and to diminish open-mindedness”.
We’ve all come across ‘inelastic’ staff, poisoning the wells of innovation with their lack of open-mindedness because they’ve been there, seen it, done it, got the careless-of-appearance t-shirt.
At times, dear reader, even my own elasticity sags. The respondents provided a “startling indictment of the very old teacher for setness in method, fixedness in opinion and resentment of suggestions for improvement”.
We’ve all met (and occasionally been) that member of staff who claims there’s not much new under the sun and they’ll be blowed if they’re going to alter decades-old practice for some upstart head.
I myself, far-sighted and visionary as I am, have been known to eye with scepticism certain popular innovations: brain gym was, for me, brain dead. Growth mindset? Growth, my arse!
It is important to separate out age from incompetence. I’ve met more than a few young and incompetent teachers and plenty of older, brilliantly effective ones.
My elder (but by no means elderly) sister recently voluntarily gave up her one-day-a-week job in a challenging area of Liverpool because she had just turned 70 and thought she’d earned a bit of a rest. It was her choice to go.
The head kept asking her back despite her age and being relatively expensive because she was a good practitioner and good value for money. Age is mostly irrelevant in terms of teaching quality.
At heart, it’s all about the money, stupid! Age – or rather experience – increases the wage bill. If you have a school staffed with teachers on the upper pay scale, the budget is tight.
If you have a school staffed with NQTs, you might be able to afford those ‘little extras’ – like pencils – rather than having to crowdfund them. If older teachers were on special bargain-basement offer you can bet heads would be queueing up to employ them.
This ‘problem’ of expensive older teachers is further aggravated by government changes to the retirement age, or ‘work till you drop’. Essentially, the government wants to save money by only paying you a pension for about five minutes, so you’re only allowed to retire when practically on your deathbed.
The sci-fi classic Logan’s Run depicted a future society in which people were killed – or, as the Logan’s Run government put it, ‘renewed’ – aged 30, in order to save on pensions and medical costs as well as keeping schools mercifully free of staff on the Upper Pay Scale, though it’s been a while since I’ve seen it so my recollection of key plot points is sketchy.
Back in the real world, in a more enlightened approach, Northern Ireland introduced a £33m plan for ‘refreshing the workforce’, allowing teachers aged 55 to 59 the dignity of taking the pension they had earned but without any actuarial reduction.
In England, we apparently spurn such generous and pragmatic enterprises in favour of simply bullying teachers out.
That 1918 study noted sympathetically of older teachers that “all their life has been taken out of them by their years of work and they have no ambition to renew it”. Reader, whether in your 20s or your 60s, you know we’ve all had days like that.
Kevin Harcombe is a Teaching Awards winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham.
