Yes, There’s A Retention Crisis, Says Gareth Sturdy, And It’s Up To Us To Do Something About It
Great teachers don’t quit – Why it’s up to the profession, not politicians, to sort keep educators in schools
A few months ago, I began to be haunted. A disturbing feeling settled on my shoulders: there was no school left in Britain in which I could feel happy teaching.
I’d tried all the options: tough, urban comps; leafy suburb selectives; market town colleges; cool start-ups with the paint still wet.
No matter where I went, sooner or later the same bad pennies would start rolling in: performance management; triple-marking; detailed planning and preparation; after-hours support sessions; the appalling behaviour of narcissistic children on one side, and on the other leaders with delusions of CEO grandeur and nasty cases of best practice addiction.
Contemporary schooling had been reduced to edufads, process and bureaucracy and I wanted out.
I knew my colleagues felt the same because numbers of them were leaving and Friday nights in the pub had become support sessions for the demoralised. It didn’t matter what the school, the number of supply staff was growing as experience and expertise were haemorrhaging.
Years of mismanagement
So when the headlines about a recruitment and retention crisis started erupting last year, I was gob-smacked. Via the unions, in the press and on social media teachers had been saying for some time that no one would put up with what passed for our job if they could in any way afford not to. Yet here was a succession of policymakers, heads and quangos all taken by surprise.
This management class seemed clueless as to their culpability in bringing the crisis about. They were clearly estranged from their workforce, and no wonder.
The people in charge were now often much younger and more highly ambitious but dangerously inexperienced. They’d been promoted too quickly, serially. They had usually developed during the New Labour years, and business school tick-box proceduralism was second nature. Running a school to them was the performance of managerialism not the shepherding of precious subject specialists.
Education is stuffed under this lot, I concluded, and despite winter coming on I knew the time had finally come for me to go. But I hesitated before pressing my own ejector button. I tried telling myself we teachers were lions led by donkeys, but I couldn’t make it stick.
There is precious little pride among teachers these days. We are a cowed, atomised crowd of nervous drones toiling away under personalised targets. Yet there is an argument for saying you get the management you deserve. It struck me that what’s actually taking place is not a crisis of retention in teaching, but a crisis of purpose.
Why teach at all?
Burying a teacher under a pile of marking is, of course, going to result in them asking ‘what’s the point of all this?’ But once that existential genie has been let out of the bottle, measures to lighten the workload or sacking an incompetent boss or two will not force it back in.
A teacher’s dark night of the soul is the time to draw deep on the reasons they came into the profession in the first place: the ‘passing it on’ of The History Boys, the ‘carpe deum’ of Dead Poets Society, Plutarch’s flame of learning.
People are leaving the profession because when they look for those deeper reserves of purpose, they find them absent.
The retention crisis is a symptom of a broader collapse of meaning across education. We are no longer able to articulate coherently what teachers are for. It’s not the job of a government minister or Ofsted chief to do that. And it can’t be done from your own front room. You can only do it from a classroom, as a working teacher.
In many schools the situation for ordinary teachers is desperate. Burnout is a real and serious thing. It can feel impossible to keep clinging on. But the answer to this crisis isn’t for teachers to exit the profession. If every day feels like D-Day, then thank god they didn’t think of retreating on the real Omaha Beach. It would be tragic if our children were abandoned by the best and most experienced people at the moment they need them the most.
Persevere – or die trying
Focusing on the rubbish diktats just skewers the debate on the terms set by management, which are all about individuals and career paths. It fosters a counsel of despair. The only course of action with genuinely positive potential is to see teaching as a moral activity, with transcendent aims and qualities.
It’s one of the most important jobs anyone can do today. Edwardian missionaries used to set sail for Sierra Leone with their belongings packed in their own coffins, so persuaded were they that they would probably die trying. But such apocalyptic high stakes invested their endeavour with worth, not fatalism.
It meant they could endure all manner of hardship because they felt possessed by an extraordinary purpose. A similar re-discovery of sacred purpose is now required among teachers to halt the brain drain.
When Monday morning rolls around again and you have to go in to work to face another grilling over your failure again to keep up with the inane accountability and monitoring measures, how about resisting the urge to quit?
Instead remember the words of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
The next meeting of the Institute of Ideas Education Forum, which gathers monthly to discuss trends in education policy, theory and practice, will ask ‘How should we defend the noble art of teaching?’ and takes place in Central London on Monday 20 March. All teachers, parents and education professionals are welcome.
Gareth Sturdy is a science teacher in London, and an organiser of the IOI Education Forum.
