I was disheartened to see recent media coverage positioning Teach First’s well-considered recommendations for teachers’ working conditions as calls for “lie-ins” (Teachers in England offered lie-ins to make job more appealing, 19 September). This oversimplified narrative undermines the critical need to address the growing teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
Teach First’s report advocates for a more flexible and balanced working environment, proposing measures such as two free periods a week for preparation, more opportunities for remote working, and a nine-day fortnight. These are not frivolous demands, but rooted in a desire to protect teachers’ wellbeing, enable them to thrive in their roles and, ultimately, improve outcomes for students.
By distilling this down to a narrative of “lie-ins”, the media risks trivialising the significant issues facing our education system. Teaching is an essential profession, yet it is one where burnout is rife and opportunities for flexibility, something increasingly expected in most professions, are lacking.
What Teach First is calling for is not special treatment, but a fairer, more supportive approach to the teaching profession – one that aligns with the wider movement toward flexible working. As we at Working Families know, flexible working opportunities are key to promoting long-term productivity, job satisfaction and a sustainable workload. This isn’t about offering perks, it’s about creating conditions where professionals can perform at their best while maintaining their wellbeing.
Jane van Zyl
CEO, Working Families
• All teachers live with the impact of the recruitment and retention crisis, and see daily how it affects what we can deliver for our students. Our education system is now dominated by private multi-academy trusts (Mats), which has led to less and less flexibility and an erosion of the most basic trust in us as professionals. To cite one example: on the same day as your article, National Education Union members in two schools belonging to the Thames Learning Trust, based in Slough and Reading, were on strike over having their pay docked for attending serious medical appointments for themselves or their children.
Teaching must be made more flexible and attractive. While your article highlights a number of positive initiatives, the issues of workload, pay and Ofsted are also major contributors to the problems. But unless we get to grips with the wild-west Mat system bequeathed by the last government, we are not going to see real progress on keeping teachers and school staff.
Phil Clarke
President, National Education Union
• Alongside pay, working conditions and flexibility, the big elephant in the room is class size (The Guardian view on the teacher shortage: flexibility and career breaks could help, 19 September). I teach geography in a secondary state school. Class sizes have swollen to 32. Across a full-time teaching, timetable you might teach 11 classes, which amounts to 352 students. I think most parents would expect a 10-minute appointment with their child’s teacher through the year, which works out as 58 hours of contact time for the teacher – impossible to achieve.
The number of students we are expected to teach is unmanageable and leaves you feeling unable to do your job effectively.
Peter Russell
Sheffield
• As a former headteacher in a hard-to-recruit area and a scientist by degree, my perspective was always focused on your issue of recruitment. In the days when professional, sabbatical exchanges with other countries were not only possible but encouraged, attracting staff was incentivised. The benefits to teachers, schools and students were immeasurable and long-lasting.
Such an outward-looking policy disappeared years ago and, post-Brexit, looks unlikely to return. Finding science and maths teachers is like hunting unicorns. To remain in a profession that requires stamina, determination and dedication to address the challenges all teachers face daily from students, parents, external bodies and workload requires more than tinkering with nine-day fortnights and marking at the kitchen table. Nothing short of inspirational ideas will solve this.
Joyce Shorrock
East Butterwick, North Lincolnshire
• The suggestions for flexible working usefully recognises that work overload has damaged recruitment for, and retention in, teaching and offers some welcome initiatives. Unfortunately, your chosen headline – however unintentionally for an otherwise informative piece – both misrepresents the essence of the report’s recommendations and plays to some damaging prejudices, fondly held by those with a jaundiced view of the profession.
Whatever it is that teachers may do with a range of flexible arrangements, and notwithstanding some experimental evidence that “You can tell who has had the morning off”, I am sure many teachers would recoil at the notion that they are desirous of a lie-in or that their situations could be so simply remedied. As aformer teacher, I know that I would feel insulted, and know too the ammunition it provides to those who cling doggedly to their favourite misconceptions about the profession.
Paul McGilchrist
Cromer, Norfolk
• There is, I believe, another important factor for teaching becoming increasingly unattractive. The delivery of learning has become formulaic, with the use of off-the-shelf schemes and little space for creativity. While this reduces planning time and can be helpful up to a point for teachers new to the profession, it does not allow them to bring their strengths and interests to the classroom. With increasing pressure externally, teaching is becoming a box-ticking exercise rather than a career to instil an enjoyment of learning.
Sophie Hill
Oxford
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