UK struggles to recruit, keep teachers

Despite the stereotype about teachers enjoying long holidays and seemingly short workdays, a closer look at the state of British education reveals a cause for alarm: In terms of recruitment and retention, the British system is in crisis.

For five years running, the recruitment target for new teachers in England has been missed. In addition, a recent survey by the National Education Union found that 26 percent of respondents who had been teaching for between two and five years said they planned to quit in the next five years.

Anna Lise Gordon, the director of the Institute of Education at St Mary's University in West London- whose teacher training programs were recently ranked "outstanding" by the government education inspector Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills－said surviving the early days is one of the biggest challenges that teachers face.

"Optimism and goodwill will get you so far, but not the whole way," said Gordon, whose institute has many student teachers from overseas. It also offers a two-year master's in teaching and learning program aimed specifically at Chinese teachers.

"We have a huge diversity of people training－increasingly older people seeking a career change, and a lot of them have the best intentions. But the reality is that everyday school life is challenging.

"We work a lot on building resilience and preparing people for the workplace, but the next step is to be employed. If the employing school isn't on the same wavelength, it can be tricky."

Lucy McCance is among those who have left the teaching profession in recent years, emotionally drained after 15 years in the classroom.

"I used to work in advertising. When I did a teacher recruitment campaign, so much of what the teachers said about creativity, a sense of achievement and achieving outcomes for young people resonated with me," she said.

"They inspired me to switch, and after I trained, as far as I was concerned, that was it. I'd found my perfect profession."

From the outset, teaching English and media studies to students ages 11 to 18, at a school with 1,300 students, was demanding－but worth it, McCance said.

"You didn't have time for anything other than planning and marking, but seeing the outcomes you were achieving for the students made it worthwhile."

However, layer after layer of systems were put in place "to make everyone do the same thing, so it got to a point where it could be anyone standing up there in front of the class," the former teacher said.

"I'm not against using statistics to spot patterns and identify needs, but they don't tell the whole story. As a teacher, you need to think about how to deal with pupils and improve them individually. Once they're treated as numbers, they stop caring and behavior goes downhill."

Having entered the profession with such good intentions, McCance saw her workplace changing, and the results, she said, were not good for anyone. Eventually, enough was enough.

"I was a square peg in a round hole," she said. "Being forced to do things you feel are unethical is very stressful, and I realized I had to get out for the good of my own health.

"When I said I was quitting, many of my colleagues said they wanted to do the same, and several have done so since then," she added. "But I also felt devastated about what had happened to the school I loved. I felt bad about how the system was no longer equipping students for the skills they need in life."

Gordon, the director of the Institute of Education at St Mary's, said parental pressure is among hazards that teachers face, but workload is the factor that many new teachers consider most daunting.

That's because the popular image of teaching is so far from the truth, she said.

"Everyone feels they're more of an expert, but just because you have more information doesn't mean you actually know more," she said.

"We make sure our trainees are prepared for dealing with demanding parents, but I don't think that's really changed all that much over the years.

"Something that doesn't help, though, is the thing about long holidays and short days－it's so antiquated, it's almost insulting. People don't realize the diversity of demands in trying to manage so many different types of people in any one classroom.

"A teacher's job is very complicated. Every time there's a perceived problem in society relating to young people, things which in the past would have been dealt with in the family, it's added on to the teacher's job."

Gordon said teacher retention is an even bigger worry than recruitment.

"There's no point investing a lot of time and energy on training to teach if they drop out within a couple of years," she said.

"The first few years are absolutely the hardest, but once you get past that, it's so much better. I'm researching what helps people to stay in teaching. If we focus on that, rather than why they leave, we can try and encourage that more elsewhere."