Teacher Shortage Crisis

rustybin

This is great. The PM, and the Schools Minister becoming a little mixed up with questions they expect your average 10/11 year old to answer.

Listen: Schools Minister Nick Gibb gets SATs question for 11-year-olds wrong

PMQs: Cameron asked English grammar questions by Lucas - BBC News

The education system in this country is now bordering on absolute insanity.

Pecker

The hits just keep on coming:

Bleak outlook: teacher shortages loom in almost all secondary school subjects, says expert

Steve W

rustybin

What an incredible waste of public money this is:

Supply teacher spend exceeds £800m - BBC News

Don't get me wrong, there are 'some' very good supply teachers out there who supply for various good reasons, but a large number (in my experience) are crap teachers who've been managed out of their full-time positions (with no one to replace them) and now make very good money exploiting the teacher shortage crisis. They come in, do an average job at best (working to rule), then we get rid and replace them with another - just keep shuffling the pack.

The private sector at work.

Any the knock on effect on learning and waste in other areas is absolutely enormous.

johntheexpat

The three supply teachers I know of all left full time teaching because they felt they weren't teachers but admin first then teachers.  They see supply teaching as a route to reduce that and the stress.  It means they may not know the pupils which I can see makes them less effective, but sometimes you have to think of the individual.

How different though is this debate to that about the NHS?  Staff shortages due to excessive pressure and stress, being filled at massive expense by temporary staff from agencies.  Highly qualified people haemoraging at an alarming rate, for posts elsewhere and the rate of replacements coming through from higher education lacks behind.

We know "they" are privatising healthcare in the UK.  Perhaps too they are privatising education, since the similarities are remarkable.  Academies first, then......

Pecker

John, there's a lot of it about, as they say.

Ultimately, even if the standard of supply staff is high, it's not as good for anyone's education if they're not taught by the same, regular, permanent staff, but by someone who is (quite literally) here today and gone tomorrow, even if they're an excellent classroom practitioner.

Steve W

Pecker

I won't open a new thread for this, as I'm sure everyone interested in education is dipping in to this one.

There is another crisis looming, and it's coming to a head very quickly.

Students in Year 10 (4th Year in old money) have started new GCSE courses this year in English and maths.  You may have heard about these new GCSEs  they're to be graded 9-1 instead of A*-G, and course are being completely overhauled.

Almost all other subjects are to follow in September.  Well, that's the idea.

Currently, only around two-thirds of the new courses have been accredited, meaning that, with just over 7 school weeks left, a large number of staff don't know what they'll be teaching their new GCSE students in September.

On the plus side (up until now) all of the courses are available in draft form.  They have been sent to Ofqual, and sent back to the exam boards for 'tweaking', so whilst you might not have a finished spec to work with, you've got a damn good idea.

As I say, until now.  Then yesterday afternoon, this happened:

Exclusive: OCR exam board drops modern foreign language GCSEs and A levels

To be clear, this is the first implication.  Around one tenth of students in the country will be taking a GCSE in languages in September, and their teachers have absolutely no idea what they'll be teaching them.  Staff who were planning to go with OCR have found out within the last 20 hours that they'll have to start reading the specs for MFL GCSEs from other boards.

The second implication is that any other staff who were planning to teach a particular subject from a particular exam board, but where that course isn't yet accredited (and to repeat, that's about a third of all courses), are suddenly living with the very real possibility that the course they were intending to teach may not run at all.  Like OCR with MFL, the possibility has just been opened that they'll simply pull the plug.

If it is announced today that the courses aren't running, these staff have a total of 38 school days to plan to teach a new GCSE, completely from scratch.  If it's announced tomorrow, it's 37 days, and so on.

Suffice to say, until a course is fully accredited, no one is daft enough to publish a text book or any other course materials.  If a board announced today that a particular course has just been accredited, I don't think the new text books will be ready before schools break for the summer in July.

So if you have a child in Year 9 who is about to start their GCSEs in September, or in Year 11 and about to start their 'A' Levels in September, you might want to start worrying.  Because, with a third of courses not yet accredited, and with each student taking approximately 10 GCSEs or 4 'A' Levels, this problem will affect the vast majority of students.

And in case you were wondering, yes the unions, the exam boards, and the 'bloody moaning teachers' all warned the government at the start of the process that they'd not given enough time, and have continued to warn them at regular intervals that thing were not going well.

As ever, once the dust has settled, it'll be the students who suffer.

Steve W

johntheexpat

Absolutely agree.  But having kids taught by stressed out, over- worked and hugely under appreciated teachers is not a good solution either.
I have always stated that to me, education is by far and away the most important function that society carries out.  Everything we do is ultimately about preparing the next generation and if they are better fed, better educated, more motivated and better than us altogether, then that is success.  Anything else is failure.

To see education as a political football and "just another dambed expense" is today's society' s greatest shame.

Good teachers should be revered and held in truly high esteem.  They should be amongst the most celebrated and highly regarded citizens.  Not treated like they are.
IMO

Pecker

Chances are her school isn't doing OCR (90% chance it seems, as only 10% do OCR).

The other subjects...watch this space.  Edexcel RS have just submitted their 4th draft.

Steve W

IronGiant

Thank for the info Steve, I appreciate it

tapzilla2k

Sounds like a delightful post summer holiday's PR disaster for the Government if parents discover children don't have enough courses to study for GCSE's and A-Levels. And a complete nightmare for teachers who'll most likely get the blame from certain parents for something entirely out of their control. My nephew starts Primary School in January and I'm already fearing for his schooling future.