NEWS: Teachers Quitting as Pay and Behaviour Worsen

As reported by The Guardian, a new report reveals record teacher vacancies in England, with worsening student behaviour, low pay, and rigid working conditions driving staff to quit

Teachers in England are abandoning the classroom over worsening pupil behaviour, stagnant pay and inflexible working practices, leaving vacancies at their highest rate on record, according to a report.

It warned that this month’s spending review was the government’s “last chance” to meet its manifesto pledge of hiring 6,500 additional teachers in state schools, as younger teachers continue to abandon the profession since the Covid pandemic and fewer graduates sign up as trainees.

More than six teaching posts in every 1,000 were left unfilled last year, according to the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), double the vacancy rate recorded before the Covid pandemic in 2020 and six times higher than the NFER’s first measure of vacancies in 2010.

Jack Worth, the NFER’s school workforce expert and a co-author of the report, said: “Teacher recruitment and retention in England remain in a perilous state, posing a substantial risk to the quality of education.

“The time for half measures is over. Fully funded pay increases that make teacher pay more competitive are essential to keeping teachers in the classroom and attracting new recruits.”

The NFER said pupil behaviour was “one of the fastest-growing contributors to teacher workload” since the pandemic, and was likely to be linked to pupils’ mental health and challenges in supporting children with special educational needs.

Other reasons given for the exodus from the workforce included the profession’s inability to adopt some of the hybrid and flexible working arrangements introduced in other parts of the graduate labour market since the pandemic.

The NFER said school leaders could do more to adopt flexible working practices to improve teacher retention, however, such as greater provision for part-time working and allowing teachers to use their allocated planning, preparation and assessment time at home.