Why is the UK facing a shortage of teachers?

Hello guys. It is official - we are (still) suffering from a chronic shortage of teachers in the UK as the government is trying various new measures to try to attract more people to the profession. On the surface, it does seem like a very respectable profession to go into in challenging economic circumstances - there are generous pay packages for teachers, you are paid a tax-free allowance during your training period and most of all, given the economic turmoil we're facing in the next few years in the face of Brexit, teachers can rest assured there will always be schools which will need teachers regardless of the political and economic turmoil this country may face. It is not like there are many better options out there for young graduates looking for jobs in the UK currently, so why are they shunning teaching then? This is a hard topic for many to talk about as nobody wants to offend teachers. They provide a vital service for our communities to educate our children, it does take a politically incorrect blogger like myself to tackle this difficult issue.

May I put a disclaimer out there: I'm not a teacher, I work in corporate finance. I have good friends who are teachers and my parents are retired teachers. The closest I have ever gotten to teaching was coaching gymnastics in the past. What I have done however, is go round to a few of my teacher friends who have either recently left teaching or are contemplating leave teaching and what I am presenting represents a lot of what they have told me. Whilst I am primarily focused on the situation in the UK regarding the teacher shortage, many other countries do face the same challenges of trying to attract more young people to join the profession. I hope that these frank, honest stories will at least allow us to start a conversation about the issue because it is a lot more than the workload for the teachers that is the problem.

Emily's story 

When I graduated from university, I struggled to find a job - it's not easy when you're not from one of those top universities like Oxford or Cambridge, it's not like there are hundreds of companies just waiting to offer you exciting, fun jobs. The only jobs I could find were going to take me in career paths that I was definitely not keen on going down, so teaching seemed like a fairly decent option given the rather attractive packages offered. I was initially happy with my career choice but after four years, I am thinking about leaving - but without having first identified what I want to do with my life, I don't want to rush into another job or make myself unemployed without knowing what I want to do next. I am taking my time considering my options, thinking about what makes me happy before taking the plunge and saying, that's it, no more teaching. I don't want people to be able to identify the school I am teaching at as I am going to be quite blunt here - this is mostly out of respect for the privacy of the people I work with, the children I teach and also for my privacy.

The first issue I have is that sinking feeling of stagnation; I teach in a school in a quiet commuter town about an hour from London, if you get the fast train that goes non-stop. That's where some parents choose to buy a house when they have kids, so the children are growing up in a quiet neighbourhood whilst their parents are just an hour away from their exciting jobs in London. I see these parents go to the train station in the morning and get on the train, whilst I'm heading to the classroom thinking, what am I doing with my life here? I keep in touch with my old friends and classmates through social media and some of them have gone on to do incredible things: they have jobs that require international travel, I see them post photos of themselves taking selfies in New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Cape Town, Berlin, Dubai and I think, great - what shall I post today? Anything I post is just going to make my life look miserable in comparison to theirs. Who is going to want to follow me on Instagram when my life is so dull? It's not just the boredom of my daily routine revolving around the school where I work, rather it is when I compare it to what my friends are doing, that's when I feel a sickening sense of envy, of jealousy, wishing that I could do what they do. Looking at Instagram just leaves me feeling depressed.

I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of 'opportunity cost' - it is defined as 'the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen'. Sometimes when I can't sleep at night, or when I get so bored with what I am doing that I just stare out of the window, I ask myself, Emily where would you rather be right now? I imagine what it would be like to live a life that is Instagram worthy, a life that is so fascinating that people would be enthralled just scrolling through your Instagram feed. If I actually took pictures and posted anything on Instagram, most people would think that I am a total loser - that I am some sad, old maths teacher spinster who has no fun, no life, no friends. I try to fight those thoughts by being pragmatic. My parents are happy that I have a stable job, a stable income and they probably don't expect me to achieve much more than that - they have always had low expectations for me and by that token, I've already exceeded those expectations. I am from a typical working class family, so for me to become a teacher, my parents are already really happy. For a while I used to think, if they're happy, then I must be doing alright, right? But am I happy today? Hell no.

Another major factor why I want to leave is the staff at the school - OMFG. Don't get me wrong, it's not like they are horrible to me or anything like that. They're alright, they're okay to work with let's put it that way. There's this woman: let's call her Mrs K, she is kinda fat and she's been at the school for a long time, like at least twenty years. She takes pride in a her job, but in a way that is scary; like the fusses over every detail of everything that goes on in her class. Like the other day, some of my students took some exercise equipment from the gym for a science experiment and I was like, yeah sure let's see where you're going with this. I'm open minded enough to let the kids have fun like that but Mrs K spotted what I did and she got angry. She said that I needed to clear things with the PE department without just taking their things and that if my students started raiding the PE storeroom for stuff to use in the classroom, then her kids would want to do the same and she was not having that. I was like, woah, calm down, it's no big deal, is it? Like did anyone get hurt? Nope. Did we put everything back neatly? Yes. But for her, it was such a big deal - I got worried that I would turn into her one day. It's not her obesity that bothers me, but the fact that she has convinced herself that what she is doing is so vital, so important and that every detail has to be so perfect. I want to tell her, "just relax, chill out - your students are so young, none of what they learn now really matters - perhaps later when they get to their A levels, that's when it starts to matter more because it determines which university they can get into, but please, the stuff now is really unimportant."

Mrs K is just one example of a teacher like that - my school is full of teachers like Mrs K who take their jobs very, very seriously, too seriously in fact. I remember once when I was at university, I left the building via a fire escape door. That door is normally shut but someone had opened it and left it opened, I spotted it and thought, short cut! But the moment I stepped through the door, the security guard ran up to me and screamed at me as if I had just detonated a bomb that blew up the university. And I tired to explain that the door was already left open, it wasn't me, I wasn't the one who opened it but that security guard was having his moment and he clearly took his job way too seriously. I was nice about it, I apologized but he decided to be a total cunt about the whole incident and was determined to berate me as if I was a young child. I remember walking away from that fire exit door thinking, what a fucking loser, I'm never going to turn into someone like that who takes their job way too seriously. I swore I would get a important job where people would respect me, where I would be able to make an important contribution to society. I wanted a job where people depended on me taking my job seriously - but when I realized Mrs K had turned into that security guard at my university, I knew it was time for me to move on. So, I don't quite know what I want to do yet, but I have a clear idea of what I don't want to turn into.

There are people whom I do respect. Let me give you an example: my auntie was diagnosed with cancer last year and the doctor who initially treated her told her that the outlook was very bleak, he gave her less than a year to live. She got referred to a specialist who decided to ignore the initial diagnosis and try a different kind of treatment - my auntie's cancer is now in remission and it was nothing short of a miracle. We were so helpless and totally reliant on this cancer specialist. I can't tell you just how grateful we are to this cancer specialist and when someone like him takes his job seriously, amazing things happen - lives are changed! I still have my beloved auntie with us today. But when people like Mrs K and that security guard take their jobs seriously, people roll their eyes and think they're delusional losers who have lost touch with reality. Yeah, I'd like to be someone like that cancer specialist but I've left it too late to pursue a career in medicine - I never thought I was smart enough to do medicine anyway, that's for the smart kids with excellent results, not me. I was just average, plain mediocre. I didn't fail my exams, I didn't cause any trouble in school, but I never won any awards or competitions, I never stood out as a clever student. I was just plain vanilla average, even verging on boring.

People have said to me, you can make a difference, right there in the classroom - you are a teacher after all, isn't that what teachers do? There are all these inspirational stories about people who have had their lives turned around by good teachers, like they were on a downward spiral before a teacher believed in them and rescued them from certain doom. We're all familiar with heart warming stories like that, but in reality, well, the things I do in the school is actually a lot more mundane because it is geared towards helping students do well in exams rather than performing the more dramatic, life-changing type miracles. Look, it's a decent school in a respectable neighbourhood, the kids there aren't exactly drug addicts or from broken families - if anything, it's pretty bland, boring and average with students from quite ordinary homes and nice parents. Perhaps I should be grateful that I'm not working in a school where the students get stabbed and the teachers are intimidated at work, but on the other hand, I'm just not quite sure what I am accomplishing here. I saw Mrs K the other day go out of her way to tell a student off for not tying her hair up properly and I'm sure in Mrs K's head, she is convincing herself that she has made a huge difference in that child's life in instilling much-needed discipline but the child probably just thought she had wasted a few minutes of her time listening to Mrs K nagging. There is this huge gap between Mrs K's perception of what she is doing and how her students perceive her. I can see that so clearly but Mrs K is so full of herself, she is oblivious to her own bullshit - I don't think she's stupid but the way she's so wrapped up in her own bullshit is verging on being scary. But what is the alternative? I have already given in to my own jaded cynicism.

It is not like I hate teaching - no, it is a pretty decent job and that's why I am afraid to leave, just in case I regret that decision. In a worst case scenario, I leave teaching and I get another job then I realize, actually I prefer teaching then I try to go back to it and end up in a much worse school. Yeah, that'll be the worst case scenario. That's why I am hesitant, but on the other hand, if I don't start looking for something better, twenty years could just slip by easily and one morning, I'll wake up, look in the mirror and realized, oh shit I've just turned into Mrs K. Yeah that would be just terrible - it's what a friend has described as a fur-lined rut. It is comfortable of course, but a rut is still a rut even if it is fur-lined. If it was any worse, then it would make my decision to leave a lot easier but there are just too many unknowns about what I would be leaving it for, hence that's why I am sticking to my fur-lined rut. There's another woman at the school, let's call her Mrs R - she has three young children and for her, it's just a job. She does the bare minimum so she can rush home and cook dinner, do the laundry and take her of her family. She's quite the opposite of Mrs K, but then again, she's hardly the perfect teacher either and I don't think she's that happy either. I don't want to turn into either Mrs K or Mrs R in ten years.

You know what someone said to me the other day? You're still young, you're pretty enough, go get yourself a rich husband and that'll be the end of your troubles - you'll have money, you won't need to work, you can even hire servants to take care of the children, it'll be a wonderful life. Sometimes that seems too tempting, what a simple solution eh? So where is my prince charming who is going to give me everything I want? If I want to date someone around my age, then he'll probably be struggling with a job the way I am, just starting out, first or second job after graduation. If I wanted a rich man, then I'd have to do the Melania Trump thing and marry a rich, fat, older man - no, that's certainly not the kind of route I'd wanna go down. I don't think I'm incapable of holding down a decent job, to be able to earn a living, I don't want to be financially dependent on a man. That's not what I want, I don't think such men would gladly give their wives vast sums of money to go shopping, go on fancy holidays and dine at nice restaurants all the time - they probably want the wives to bear them children and you'll get little say in that relationship. Do I want that? Like how does Melania Trump bear the thought of having sex with someone as gross as Donald Trump? She may be the first lady of the USA but what a price to pay. Goodness me. No, I'd like to believe that if I'm capable of being a good teacher, then that proves I'm capable of many other things and I'm still interested to push the boundaries of what I can achieve, on my own steam.

Ralph's story 

I would be the first to put my hand up and say I got into teaching for the wrong reasons - it is important for me to say that right from the start because a lot of people would claim that it is the government's fault for not supporting teachers enough or not funding schools, but the reason why I want to leave teaching has nothing to do with any of that. I am leaving because I made a mistake. I graduated with a degree in maths some years back and it is virtually impossible to find a job directly relevant to maths  and I wasn't keen to go into engineering. I was passionate about maths and really wanted to be in an environment where I could use my degree, so it was on that basis that I settled for teaching because it seemed like the most obvious option. I ended up teaching maths in a secondary school and it became clear to me after a year or so that it was definitely a mistake that I would live to regret. You see, there's nothing wrong with teaching if you want to teach - but in my case, I had enjoyed being a student so much that I simply wanted to continue learning, doing research, discovering, conducting experiments. There's a huge difference between being a teacher and being a student.

The first year I was a teacher, okay, it wasn't so bad but the moment I started my second year of teaching, I realized that I was going to have to go through the same syllabus over and over again, year after year - it was like groundhog day. As a student, I had a lot of freedom to pursue certain areas of interest and I was supported by excellent teachers who supported my quest for knowledge - but in most schools these days, the students are not interested in anything more than doing the bare minimum to get the right grades in the exam. You know, the scope of the syllabus comes across as painfully limited for me and I get frustrated: the kids only now so much at their age and I'm wary not to teach them more than what is require for their exams. What's the point in overloading them with information they don't need in exams anyway. My key problem is that I am interested in maths, the kids are not. You could argue that it is my job to make the students interested in maths, but in my opinion that's impossible. It's like saying, hey make someone fall in love with the taste of grapefruit. Once you've tasted grapefruit, you're pretty much going to come to your own conclusion whether you like the taste of it or not. And if you dislike the taste, then this fruit is not for you. Maths is what it is - some people find it fascinating, others find it dull and yet others find it frustratingly confusing; but there is only so much a teacher can do.

I suppose if I was teaching at a university level, then yeah I would be dealing with young adults who have chosen to study mathematics. They would have far more interest in the subject, but dealing with teenagers who have to do maths because they have no choice, oh dear, this was not what I had signed up for. They are not interested and there are times when I just want to give up and say, fine, you're not interested and I don't want to force you, what's the point. But if I did just that, then they will fail their exams and that's when I would get into trouble as a teacher because the teacher has to get the students to pass the exams. The teachers who have been doing it for many years, they give me all kinds of advice about what I should do to try to get the kids interested, to motivate them and encourage them but that is a part of my job that has little to do with maths per se, but it is more about being good with children and that's where I am useless. It is probably something that comes a lot more naturally to some teachers than others - my colleague Penny is really good with children, she grew up in a big family with loads of younger siblings and cousins, she is a mother and so talking to children, communicating with them is something that just comes naturally to her but for me, it's anything but natural. I don't have that natural disposition for it. Perhaps teaching should be left to people like her, rather than people like me.

I don't know what I will do next, I am thinking about going back to university to study some more, but I doubt I can afford that. There are the practicalities you know about paying the bills, I can't expect my parents to support me - they have problems of their own and I do like the security of a teaching job, I don't have to worry about money. No it is not going to make me rich, it's not like the money is so good that it is worth all the crap I have to put up with at the school, but at least now I am not worried about money which is kinda nice. But if you were to ask me, what do you want to be five years from now? Do you still want to be teaching? The answer is no, hell no. I need to think out of the box - I have a range of other interests beyond maths of course, it's just that maths was always something I found easy, it was something I was always good at in school. But there are quite a few things that I am good at, that I am passionate about. I am not just some geek who wants to hide behind a computer doing maths stuff you know, I am making sure I am spending the time and making the effort to go out there, pursuing some of my other interests to see what other career options would suit me. I rushed into teaching as a young person, as a first job - it wasn't a right decision and I'd be happier doing something different.

Frank's story

Let's be realistic here, many young people are stuck in jobs they are not finding easy but there's always some good reason why they stick with it. My friend April is working as an asset management firm - I know she is just bidding her time, knowing that once she had accumulated enough experience, she could go on to a better company but without the right kind of work experience specific to her field, she cannot hope for career advancement. So whilst her current boss treats her like crap and she doesn't get along with her colleagues, she knows putting up with it will pay off in the long run. Then there's my friend Gabriel - he trained as a chef and is now working in a famous restaurant as a sous chef: the hours are long, the pay is miserable and the people he has to work with are nasty. However, he knows that once he has accumulated enough work experience there, he can get a job in most restaurants in London because people would be impressed that he has managed to be employed for a while in one of the most prestigious restaurants in town. Then there's my friend Alison - she works in sales at a high end luxury boutique in London. The customers she has to deal with are usually rude and difficult, but she is on commission so she swallows her pride for the money - the generous commissions she can earn makes whatever abuse she has to take worth it. In all three cases, there is a good reason for them to put up with the crap at work. But when I look at my own situation, I do wonder - what the hell am I doing here?

I don't want to come across as a millennial who refuses to put up with any kind of hardship, but I just want to know why I am putting up with the crap I have to as a teacher. The career progression isn't there: there are people who start out as a teacher in their 20s and then three decades later, they are still really doing the same job. Okay, maybe they get a bit more money, but I see my friends actually going somewhere in their careers, there's something they are working hard to achieve. But for teachers, the mindset is different. April wants to go to a better, bigger, more famous firm; teachers tend to stay in one school for many years without actually switching jobs. So even if you do go teach at a more famous school, the job is essentially the same, it doesn't get any better or easier. The amount you are paid is pretty much set in stone against your pay grade, I have little incentive to go out of my way to make my students perform better apart from doing it out of the kindness of my heart. Some teachers have to deal with really difficult students - you know, the ones who are from very messed up families, they have terrible parents and by the time they get to the classroom, I just think, this kid's already so messed up, I'm here to teach English, not fix this mess. I'm an English teacher, not a social worker, I don't even now where to begin with such kids. I have known of some kind teachers who go out of their way to help troubled students but they are doing it entirely out of charity: they are not rewarded for making the effort and I think that's not right.

Is the problem with the way the teaching profession is structured? Or am I just the wrong fit for this? I just don't see how teachers who go out of their way and help their students excel are rewarded for it - there is no correlation between the performance of the students and our pay. Of course, this is but a hypothetical discussion: if you give a teacher a bunch of super bright students, the teacher has to do virtually nothing and the students will still get straight As. Give a teacher a bunch of problematic kids from broken families and the teacher may be able to walk on water, extract blood from a stone and get them to pass their exams, but on paper, the kids would still be getting Bs and Cs and their performance doesn't really reflect the miracle the teacher has performed. There is this teacher in my school who just gets by doing the minimum and when some of her kids failed their exams, she just told the rest of us, "you know, children like that, you know what it is like, the family background, the parents, you can't expect me to fix all of their problems, I am just a teacher you know." She rolled her eyes and the rest of the teachers just nodded as if it all makes complete sense - like of course those kids are completely screwed, what can us teachers do to help them? What is her incentive to help them? She is giving up without trying, it is not like she tried and failed, there's a difference. Or rather, why is there no penalty for her choosing to roll her eyes and simply turning her back on those kids who are falling through the cracks of the system?

There is also a problem of bullying in the school where I work - now, I have a colleague Danny who is super nice. When he sees it happening, he will take the time and address the issue. He will take the kids involved aside and spend time investigating, speaking to the children involved to make sure they understand, making sure that the victims are okay and not messed up as a result. I asked him about it and he said, "what choice do I have? This is the kind of shit that can really mess kids up from an early age and we have to deal with it. I went through a lot of bullying in school back in my student days and I sure as hell am not just going to stand by and turn a blind eye when I witness it. I'm a teacher after all." The problem with the system is that teachers like Danny are doing it really out of the goodness in their hearts whilst many of the other teachers simply turn a blind eye or chalk it up to, "oh boys will be boys, it is not serious, they are just playing." Our system, our schools simply assume that people who sign up for teaching as a career will be good people like Danny, who will go out of their way to 'do the right thing' simply because that's what teachers do - but often, many of the teachers don't bother. Teachers like Danny are an exception, rather than the norm I'm afraid. There is so much more to teaching than simply getting the students to pass the exams but are we supported enough to do all those other tasks?

All this just fuels my cynicism about teaching - the system is not well designed, too many assumptions are made about teachers rising to the challenge, we're not supported to do a lot of the things outside the curriculum like dealing with bullying in the school. I find it so wrong that super teachers like Danny are not rewarded for the way they go the extra mile to do so much more for their students, whilst there are others in the school who get away with rolling their eyes and turning their backs on their students. For my friends working in other jobs, they may say, "things are not great in my company right now, but as long as I get the work experience, in the future, I can move on to a much better company where they do things right." So for them, they are putting up with a lot of things that are wrong, knowing that it is not only just short-term, but it is only a problem associated with their current employer. For me as a teacher, the problem is with the system so I know that even if I go to another school in the future, I will encounter the same kind of problems and challenges. The frustrating thing for me is that I do want to teach but I am powerless as a teacher to try to fix the system. Good teachers like Danny simply are not rewarded at all. I don't know what to do and my response is simply to say, "I can't fix this - maybe I should go do something else instead and give up teaching." That's why I left last year and currently, well, I'm working in a totally different industry and there's a lot to learn of course, but you now, I am a lot happier now. At least there seems to be a far greater correlation between effort, performance and pay where I work now.

Okay that's it from me on this topic. What do you think of the stories of Emily, Ralph and Frank? Have their raised valid points or are they somewhat unrealistic in their expectations? Have you taught before or are you a teacher? What are you experiences as a teacher? Leave a comment below please, do let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading.