Will a Year’s Sabbatical Really Stop Teachers Leaving the Profession?
A year’s sabbatical once you’ve served a decade is all very well, but a quarter of teachers don’t even make it to five years
The DfE has put forward a cunning plan to stop the hemorrhaging of teachers from the nation’s schools – offer them a sabbatical.
The pilot scheme proposes £5 million funding – roughly equivalent to 250 teachers having a year-long break from the chalkface.
The idea behind the proposal – broadly welcomed by teaching unions – is to improve flexible working in schools by, for example, spending a year in industry if relevant to school work.
Which industry would that be? Who does a better job of the hundreds of personal interactions teachers manage every day?
I am old enough – no, really – to remember a scheme in the early 90s for teachers to spend a couple of weeks in industry with the clear implication that we were complete nincompoops and industry would show us how it should be done.
It was the beginning of applying business models in schools and that’s gone really well, hasn’t it?
Not everything that is valuable can be measured and accounted for in business terms, such as self-esteem, teamwork, creativity, and so on – stuff that schools do really well and which impact positively both on individual lives and on the nation’s economy.
In the 90s scheme, I spent a week on a local newspaper and learnt that the pace of work in regional news reporting was much slower and less stressful than my job teaching 34 inner-city kids.
Reporters were not, as I romantically believed, out reporting the minutiae of daily life in their area; they were sitting in a nice open-plan office, drinking tea, listening to the hourly news on the BBC and writing it down to fill column inches in the local rag.
I learnt, too, that my job was much harder than theirs and much less well-paid.
On the plus side, I also learnt about cutting corners and that sometimes ‘good enough’ is just fine, which has actually been very useful in maintaining my work-life balance (and that of my staff) in the face of the constant flow of (mainly useless) initiatives flushing out of the DfE policy toilets onto our unbelievably compliant heads.
In the latest mooted scheme, to be eligible for a sabbatical you need to have been teaching for ten years, at a time when we know that nearly a quarter of new teachers quit the profession within five.
Nearly a quarter of the 117,000 teachers who qualified between 2011 and 2017 have left – that’s 27,500 teachers voting with their feet. What gets me is that people are nonplussed at this exodus.
You give someone a good kicking then act surprised when they decide to move away from the boot you have been enthusiastically swinging into their groin over many years.
There is a shortfall of 30,000 teachers currently. Where I would once get 80 applications for a vacancy, I now get eight.
Compounding this, the government has missed its own targets for recruitment to teacher training for the past several years as it becomes a less attractive job destination due to successive governments making it ever-increasingly unappealing.
What’s caused the current crisis? Is it the workload? Target-setting pressures? Constant change? Lack of funding to match the increase in pupil numbers?
We work in an atmosphere of heightened austerity, where state schools are supplementing funding through cake sales and crowdfunding to buy luxuries like pencils and paper.
Perhaps it’s the decaying school buildings? The behaviour of the pupils and some of their parents?
Or maybe it’s the cuts to services such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, educational psychologists and speech and language therapists, meaning that many children are not getting help, which leads to more behavioural problems.
We have suffered a massively demoralising pay freeze for the past seven years while demands on our performance (in the shape of expectations of ever increasing pupil outcomes – actually a laudable aim) have increased.
Pay insufficient peanuts and the monkeys invariably bugger off. And, yes, raise taxes if necessary to properly fund schools, police and the NHS.
The causes of recruitment and retention difficulties are not hard to identify and I really doubt whether a few million spent on a term or two seeing how some other professions have it easier will really cut the mustard. Many of those on sabbaticals might simply never return.
Kevin Harcombe is a Teaching Awards winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham. Follow him on Twitter at @kevharcombe.
