A former teacher claims the stress of the job causes illness and long-term absence among colleagues, leaving some unable to get out of bed due to depression.
The 23-year-old, who asked not to be named, left her teaching job this month after less than two years after working 12-hour days on as little as four hours of sleep, with few breaks during the day and constant contact from parents. One called her "a waste of taxpayers' money" when she took time out of her break to phone the parent.
Armed with experience of helping her teacher mum as a kid, she was drawn to a teaching qualification while studying maths at the University of Liverpool, due in part to the offer of a training bursary of more than £20,000. She handled kids swearing and throwing chairs during placement, all the while balancing in-class teaching with academic studies. She thought coping with that would prepare her for anything, saying: "Because I'm quite good with my time management skills and stuff like that, I thought I'd be able to do it and I'd be able to switch off from it. I was very wrong."
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Soon after graduating, she got a job at a school in Birmingham, which was followed by a promotion in her first year. But she was one of five staff to leave their roles there this Easter. When she announced her departure, another 10 to 15 staff members approached her expressing their own desire to leave due to the stress of the job, part of a nationwide problem.
Despite some teachers describing it as a difficult decision to leave kids they've seen grow and progress, nearly half of teachers plan to quit their job within five years, according to a survey by the National Education Union, the Mirror reports.
The 23-year-old said: "Sometimes people think the main reason people leave is behaviour, and it absolutely can be. I can see how in another school that would be an issue. But behaviour wasn't an issue in my school, and there's still a huge turnover of staff, so there's a lot more to it than that."
Some of the problems teachers face are school-specific, whether that be behaviour problems, or toxic work relationships, and each school has its own strategies to reduce workloads. One school she worked at had its teachers mark workbooks only once a month, but in detail. At the other, each would teach only one or two year groups, delivering the same lesson five times, meaning they spent less time planning, but were instead expected to mark books every week.
In the Birmingham school where she secured a permanent role, she said teachers were expected to plug gaps left by staff taking time off due to "long-term stress". Time pressures only got worse with the promotion, which was a rare opportunity, she said.
The 23-year-old said she loved classroom teaching, working with numbers and managing people, but she said the additional work required was disproportionately more than the extra planning, preparation and assessment time, or the money, on offer. And that was without the added burden of being a parent or carer like many of her colleagues.
She told the ECHO: "Another thing that pushed me away from teaching was seeing my friends have way better qualities of life for the same or more pay. Money's not everything, but if your job's stressing you out to no end and you're not being compensated for it, it's not really on."
Now she's taking time off between leaving her teaching job and starting a new role as a data analyst. She said: "I consider myself a good teacher, but I don't necessarily think I should have gone into it now. I don't know if that's because I'm just not the right person for it, or if it's because the job is so difficult and the workload is so huge that I couldn't do it.
"But I do think a lot of that comes from higher than the school. I think schools are trying as hard as they can but with the current framework, I don't think it's a sustainable job or sustainable profession."
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, claimed teachers have some of the most unpaid working hours, the Mirror reports. Dr Bousted said: "This is simply unsustainable and can only lead to burn-out. The government would do well to not just accept that high workload is a problem, but that they have played a starring role in many of the contributing factors."
A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We recognise the pressure that staff in schools and colleges have been under and are enormously grateful to them for their efforts, resilience, and service now and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Teaching remains an attractive and fulfilling profession. The number of teachers in our schools remains high, with more than 461,000 teachers working in schools across the country – 20,000 more than in 2010.
"We have taken and will continue to take action to improve teacher and leader workload and wellbeing, working proactively with the sector to understand the drivers behind such issues and improve our policies and interventions."
