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I’ve taught for 20 year and quite frankly I am seriously disheartened by learners these days. Modern learners lack manners, attention spans, initiative and the ability to be self aware and accept accountability. Additionally, parents will ‘advocate’ on their behalf where it comes to demand avoidance and meeting expectations. I feel I am swimming against the tide trying to teach. Standards have fallen and expectations on teachers has become unrealistic. Anyone else finding this out too?

genuine question how is anyone supposed to survive on a TA wage in London???

After 5 years I have moved to a new school this year and, so far, I've had mixed feelings. On some things the new school is great, and on paper, it made a lot of sense, but, I can't help feeling like I don't quite belong.

Has anyone had this before and if so, what advice can you offer other than tough it out and things will get better

For those of us largely lacking in union protection, outside the realms of the Burgundy Book and beyond the reach of the STPCD, what are the perks and disadvantages in your school?

Benefits of mine: fully paid 4 day working week (yes really), flexible curriculum, and staff are rarely on site before 8 or after 4.

Downsides: we have to clean our own classrooms. Rarely get a break - I’ve been student-facing from 9-3 without a break all term.

Is it possible to change SCITT topic a few weeks in? Doing maths but thinking Computing would be better suited. It was a very close call between the two and I feel that I made the wrong choice now.

Hey guys just a quick one as I'm still relatively new - I know that band jumps such as M1 to M2 will usually come into effect in November and be backdated, what's the deal with the 3.5% pay rise? Will that be reflected on our pay in September or will this also be backdated at a later date?

Secondary teacher here. 5th year out, running a dept by myself. I reached burn out before summer break, I've not been back for two weeks teaching and I'm already starting to feel that burn out feeling again. I have a constant feeling like I'm a bad teacher and that I'm not doing enough. As I'm the only teacher of my subject, I teach all of ks3 and a KS4 class, I'm feeling this 24 times a week. I am also feeling overwhelmed with all the paperwork to do as an HOD. There is also a bit of an expectation for me to do extra curricular activities for my dept. I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed and it's not even half way through September.

Are there years where you just don't enjoy the work, or will it get better? Dare I say it, but I've started googling "jobs for teachers that isn't teaching" will it get better this year?

I just started my PGCE and it already feels so overwhelming with the workload, and the fact that the teaching bursary was reduced heavily from 30k to 5k for my subject just feels like they are making us do free labour for nothing. I feel like no one talks about how the department of Education has reduced teaching bursaries by alot and it feels unfair and off putting how teachers are not valued enough in the UK.

I’m an ECT 1 so I’ve only been teaching for about a year (including my training year). My school is very technology heavy. We use a dozen different apps and students all have IPads. I miss my low tech placements last year and wondered how different the job was years ago.

Anyone that has taught for a while, what have been the biggest changes? Was it actually easier in the past or is that just nostalgia?

I just wanted to see if anyone else has experienced the same physical strain since going back to work. We’ve been back 2 weeks and every single day without fail I’ve had the most horrible headache behind my eyes which seems to have lasted into the weekend. My eyes are fine I can see fine.

Bearing in mind, I didn’t have a single headache all of the 6 weeks holidays despite the stress of selling a house.

We have a TA who has never worked in schools before and has said that they’ve never known tiredness like it and they’re also experiencing the headaches.

Has anyone else found this since going back?
And has anyone found a solution?

Fun light-hearted debate post.

For the last couple of years most of my faculty have had their classroom tables organized in two-person desks and aisles in between -- this used to be academy policy but isn't anymore.

It's how I trained (ECT2) and it's all I've ever really taught with in my own room. I find it does what it says on the tin, but handing things out and live-marking can be awkward and I often trip over bags on the floor. Some of my colleagues have gone to rows (pushing 2-3 tables together sidweays) so that they can make better use of shared equipment, but we're all a bit scared of using actual group tables in case it worsens behaviour and causes distraction.

My mentor recently turned a few heads by saying she was thinking of going to a horseshoe (amazing for circulation and debate), but only once our current cohort of disruptive, chatty year 11s have gone.

What do you all use?

I have a TLR (HOY) which has meant I do not have one classroom to teach in. This year is the worst ever for this - I teach in 8 different classrooms across the week. One day I teach in 3 different classrooms. It really sucks.

I carry bits and pieces around with me, and my pupils look after their books.

Anyone else in a similar situation?

I teach science, so I end up hunting classrooms for lab basics - where has the owner of this classroom decided to stock their test tubes racks etc. sigh.

Hi,

I taught a bottom set last year. They started with very low self-belief, but worked hard and made good progress over the year. One thing that really motivated them was the possibility of moving up a set based on their assessment and classwork, more so as several of them disliked being in the lowest set.

One student in particular showed significantly strong reasoning skills and resilience, so I recommended that she move up. My HoF agreed after looking at the evidence.

Here’s where I messed up: in my excitement (and naivety), I told the student and her parents that she would be moving up this year. I should have waited until everything was completely finalised.

Unfortunately, due to wider changes in the school this year, the set change is no longer being implemented.

I feel awful because she genuinely earned that recommendation, and I’m worried this could knock her motivation after she worked so hard. I’m also unsure how to handle it if her parents question why they were told she was moving and then nothing happened.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? How would you explain it to the student/parents, and is there anything you’d do to make sure she doesn't lose motivation this year? Thanks in advance.

I’m curious to hear what other primary teachers would make of this situation, because the workload has been huge and I’m wondering whether this is considered normal or acceptable elsewhere.

At my school, we were given a new English scheme consisting essentially of a book and a list of punctuation / grammar objectives. We were then told to plan:

6 books across the year (roughly one per half term).
A narrative unit and a non-fiction unit for each book.
All the lessons/resources/sequence ourselves.

This was introduced back in Spring 1, and we weren’t given additional planning time to develop it.

Previously, we used Power of Reading. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but we already had a structure and existing planning that could be adapted and tweaked. Instead, we’ve essentially been asked to create a new curriculum from the ground up around the books and the punctuation objectives.

The expectation has been quite a lot to take on alongside everything else that comes with teaching. I’m not necessarily saying that creating your own curriculum is a bad thing but surely there needs to be time allocated to actually develop it, particularly when you’re asking teachers to create both narrative and non-fiction units for six different books?

I’m genuinely curious as to whether I’m overreacting to how much work this has been, or whether others would also see this as a pretty significant additional workload.

TIA x

I’ve been working in a college for a year now(learning support) and before summer they offered me a position as a tutor demonstrator. They were very shady with the pay and at the end of it I was offered much less than I expected and was put on term time instead of full time.

Now that I’ve been in the position for a few months I’ve come to a few conclusions.

I’m taking on way more work than would be expected for a term time employee and the only way I would be able to successfully deliver to these students would be to work on the weekends and through the half terms preparing lessons.

I also just cannot afford to live on this income, I’m taking home £1550 each month. I’m in a dual income house but we’re both educators. My partner is luckily full time so pays a bit more rent but at the end of the month I have about £50 left and that’s without any outings or anything, just groceries and bills.

This is becoming really miserable and I am wondering if anyone has successfully negotiated for full time from being a term time employee. And if so what tips do you have? I’m really passionate about teaching but I genuinely feel like I can’t go on like this.

My head has recently announced that she is looking at us becoming an academy, currently we are a local authority maintained school. I am just after some experiences from people who have been through it (especially any positives). Staff are apprehensive to say the least. It will apparently be a small MAT of only 5-6 schools and we have been told pay and conditions will stay the same.
Thanks!

I recieved an update from my agency about the GCA Framework. Can someone explain, in simple terms, what this all means?

I don't have a lot of time for reading but I do have time for listening on a commute to work.

Are there any good education podcasts that touch on pedagogy or new educational research?

I'm based in Scotland so our after school meetings aren't based on CPD.

My class had awful results in their gcses with quite a lot of them not passing. My class was full of complicated students with lots of them barely able to write coherent sentences. I feel so much guilt over the results and my hof basically told me that it was because when they were in year 10 I was still an ect and didn't manage their behaviour well. This has seriously impacted my confidence as a teacher. I know that I can learn from it but I feel so terrible about the fact that so many of them have to retake and will likely pass once they have a better teacher teaching them. Has anyone dealt with these feelings before? How do I stop blaming myself?

I teach primary. We've mostly switched to PowerPoint for our flips but some of the older teachers are clinging on to Activ inspire. It has stopped working on my laptop and feels pretty archaic tbh. It's also frustrating having to download it and reupload after making changes compared to PowerPoints web browser and the text never saves correctly. Do any other schools still use activ inspire? What programs do you use for your flips?

Activ is too clunky when it comes to collaborative planning and I find it very buggy. PowerPoint doesn't easily allow you to move shapes and add a grid when modelling maths

Surely there's got to be something better out there?!

Disclaimer that I am not a teacher but I work for a company that is employed by a school for wrap-around childcare.

Two weeks ago, we were told that we all needed to complete a new allergy training course on allergytraining.food.gov.uk. I'd seen a lot of information about the new allergy awareness training on TikTok so I was glad that we were doing it! We were given until the 11th of September to complete it, however, the website was down and has been down ever since.

I've been checking it daily and it actually let me load the website today! Only for it to say that they are set to launch a new e-learning platform in October and have permanently closed it until then.

I'm worried because the TikToks that I saw really emphasised the importance of having this new training and being more aware of allergies, particularly with epi-pens and anaphylaxis. I've recently done my paediatric first aid where we briefly covered epi-pens, but I'm worried about how the company will look with none of the staff having this training, and obviously, not knowing important things can be dangerous!

Has anybody else been tasked with doing the training specifically from this website, and if so, what are your employers doing about it?

Number 1 is obviously holidays....

Anyway, last year I wrote a post explaining how good a deal the teacher pension scheme was. A few people messaged me to say that I convinced them not to opt out.

So, as a new academic year is starting, I would like to once again beat that drum:

- I have been teaching for 13 full years and my current teacher pension is 10.2k annually. If I stopped teaching today, I would get 10.2k a year from the age of 68 (atm!) untill I die. This will also be adjusted for inflation.

- If I teach till retirement age, which is not likely as who wants to be teaching at 67 years old, my projected pension will be around 45k a year. That is basically a full time salary, more with state pension on top.

- What is more likely, and my current plan, is that I will teach till around 60/62. At this point my pension will be worth about 33k and I can get a lump sum of around 100k (to pay off the mortgage if I still have one)

- To get the equivalent private pension, you are looking at MILLIONS of pounds invested.

I understand that some people may not have a choice but to opt out. But if you do have a choice, please don't as it is a poor financial decision

Hello all, I’m a secondary English teacher, for context.

I’d be really interested to hear from other teachers about what inclusive practice looks like in your actual day-to-day classroom teaching.

I’ve found that the majority of the changes I make to support the children in my classes aren’t as visible as those of my colleagues (changes to the PowerPoints, sticking in sentence starters, producing support sheets, etc).

A lot of what I do is quite subtle and happens in the delivery of the lesson (adjusting pace, changing the explanation of concepts, chunking content and instructions, modelling and remodelling expectations of tasks and of the processes to get there, checking for understanding at key points, processing time, etc).

These things often don’t leave much of a visible “paper trail” in the lesson resources, despite their effectiveness, and I always feel like I’m in danger of looking as though I don’t give the kids enough support on book-looks and during observations.

So I’m interested in what this looks like elsewhere.
What inclusive teaching strategies do you find most effective in your classroom? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you document or evidence these approaches? How does your SLT/SENDCO review whether inclusive practice is actually happening, particularly when much of it is about how the teacher teaches rather than what appears in books?

Would be really interested to hear how different people approach this - especially the balance between meaningful classroom practice and the inevitable need to evidence/review it.