Make Teaching A Career Again

The teacher recruitment crisis is here now, and the impact is being seen, with 10-11,000 jobs at any one time listed on the TES website in October – historically this would be the peak number seen perhaps in April. Many of these jobs are in Australia (which is having its own teacher recruitment crisis) or other overseas countries, which is especially attractive as the nights darken in the UK!

In response to this demand the TES has pushed up its subscription rates to astronomic levels with one school deputy head tweeting that she’d been asked for ￡17,000 for a year.

The Government has responded with two new ideas – a new committee to look at workload and the suggestion of ￡3,000 bonuses for the first 5 years of a teaching career. The Labour Party has also suggested early career bonuses (of ￡2,400 this time) as a solution.

While the first idea is welcome, the other two are a reminder of the real problem in education – the short-termism that means that large numbers of teachers leave after a few years and results in England having the youngest teaching workforce in the OECD. An excellent (and free) analysis of the problem – ‘Teacher Education in Crisis: The State, the Market and the Universities in England’, edited by Viv Ellis, contains (p.27) a reference made by Sam Freedman to the ‘Wild West’ created by recent English education policy. Of course, the American ‘Wild West’ was famous for its young, short-lived, and unsustainable environment. Sinéad Mc Brearty makes a similar comparison in her TES article “Teaching becoming a ‘military-style tour of duty’, warns charity boss”.

You don’t have to go far to see this short-termism in action. Look at almost any recruitment advert. Teachers are expected to ‘deliver outstanding results for all students', 'go the extra mile', 'do whatever it takes', or 'be wedded to the job'. These seem laudable aspirations (at least the first three!), but they’re not compatible with family or caring responsibilities – and they’re not actually possible either, especially for an individual teacher, with influences outside school being equally responsible for children’s achievements (that’s not to say we shouldn’t push for changes here as well!).

To put it bluntly, the only way out of the teacher recruitment crisis is to retain those in teaching and attract the tens of thousands of qualified teachers back into the profession.

And that means making teaching a career again. But how do you do this? I've spoken to a number of schools, trusts, and current and former teachers, as well as revising my organisational development knowledge from my MBA studies and revisiting my research in this area in a former career, and it comes down to two steps.

The first step is to acknowledge the problem and change mindset. School and trust leaders need to realise that the need for teachers is paramount and will require changes, some which will slow down or change the desired aims of schools and trusts.

The second step is to put strategic recruitment and retention plans in place. These have several different elements - workforce planning, employer branding, capturing evidence, revamped recruitment processes, effective onboarding, development, reward and celebration, managing life changes and listening, reviewing, and improving. In short, schools need to become great places to work, to be known as great places to place and have a culture that celebrates retention.

I've come across some great people who are working on these issues. Sean Warren has used his vast experience as teacher and coach to develop a range of tools that allow teachers to reflect positively on their experience and plan long-term development. Andrew Goff is innovating in the benefits schools can offer staff - using their facilities to drive electric car ownership for example. Amy Allen of Senploy is working with specialist SEN recruiters to create positive perceptions of SEN jobs, while the team at MyNewTerm are making recruitment easier and more friendly.

I’m sure there are many other people working on these issues, and I hope more and more people will get in touch and start using the hashtag #maketeachingacareeragain to share their ideas and experiences. Let's see if we can make changes in time!

I'm personally keen to help schools and trust on this journey - at the moment my formal products are a 2-hour introduction to the ideas in the solution and a recruitment audit that lets you see how you appear to prospective teachers, but I'd love to discuss these issues and help create a wider plan with a school or trust on a pilot basis, as I did in the past for companies including Vodafone and law firm CMS.