Cambridgeshire teacher talks of struggling with 'unbearable' workload
A new report's found 94% of teachers cited high workload as a reason to leave teaching
Last updated 20th Mar 2024
A teacher in Cambridgeshire's telling us she's thought about leaving the profession due to pressures of the job.
In a report from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), 94% of teachers cited high workload as a reason for considering to leave the industry.
The report adds that "little progress" has been made on reducing high teacher workload, and teachers say that pupil behaviour is "driving higher workload".
The study calls on the Government to set up a view focusing on how to reduce teachers' workload related to behaviour management and pastoral care.
"The workload is sometimes unbearable"
Nicola Parker, who teaches in the county, says the amount of work can be too much:
"I have considered leaving as the workload is sometimes unbearable," she said.
"It's long days and you're exhausted, and you just want to sleep when the holidays come, but I also want to spend time with my family and don't want to spend days in bed recovering the sleep that I've lost whilst working these ridiculously long hours."
Teacher supply poses 'substantial risk' to quality of education - report
The NFER's report said the "critical state" of teacher supply in England poses a "substantial risk" to the quality of education that children receive.
It also said ambitious and "radical" actions are urgently needed to address teacher recruitment and retention challenges.
The NFER report calls for teachers to be awarded a "pay premium" to compensate for the lack of remote and hybrid working opportunities in their jobs, compared with other graduates.
It comes after figures in December showed just 50% of the Government's initial teacher training target (ITT) for secondary school subjects was reached in 2023/24, down from 57% in 2022/23.
"This shows that post-pandemic teacher recruitment in England continues to be a significant policy challenge and is likely only to worsen without concerted action," the NFER said.
'No surprise' on not achieving recruit target
Nicola said she's not shocked by the recruitment findings.
"I'm not surprised the government has missed their goals, targets for recruitment because this is a hard job to come into now," she said.
"It's good to have our concerns in black and white because it feels to most of us, that we're undervalued.
"It really is about funding education now; don't give us words, we're interested in action that will enable us to have enough staff in schools so that those staff are not covering other people's roles."
The report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, suggests that more generous training bursaries, and policies to attract international applicants, have shown signs of increasing recruitment, but improvements are likely to be "marginal".
The NFER predicts that 10 out of 17 secondary subjects are "at risk of under-recruiting" teachers in 2024/25 - based on ITT applications made up to February 2024.
Calls to improve teacher pay
Last year, teachers in England were offered a 6.5% pay rise for 2023/24.
But the NFER study suggests that it is "unlikely" that last year's pay award has significantly contributed to narrowing the gap in earnings growth compared with the wider labour market.
The report calls for the 2024/25 pay award for teachers to exceed 3.1% and be fully-funded to "improve the competitiveness of teacher pay".
Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: "The lack of specialist services and external support has left teachers and school leaders being expected to play the role of counsellor, behaviour therapist and security guard, in addition to their teaching responsibilities.
"Set against a backdrop of declining and increasingly uncompetitive rates of pay, it is little wonder that experienced teachers and headteachers are leaving prematurely and fewer graduates are choosing to come into teaching."
There are 'more teachers than ever before' - government
A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We now have more teachers than ever before, with over 468,000 teachers in the workforce, a 27,000 increase on 2010. This comes on top of the largest teacher pay rise in over 30 years, and a minimum starting salary of £30,000.
"To continue to attract the brightest and the best teachers, we offer bursaries and scholarships up to £30,000 for chemistry, computing, mathematics and physics teachers.
"We are taking steps to support their wellbeing and ease workload pressures which includes plans to support schools to reduce working hours for teachers and leaders by five hours per week."