Schools in crisis: Where have all the Yorkshire teachers gone?

LIFE for Glenn Allen has never been better. Running a 17th century pub and guest house in the picturesque Peak District village of Bakewell, his days may be long and busy but they are never as stressful as when he was teaching.

The 44-year-old taught maths in secondary schools for nearly two decades, eventually ending up as head of department at a struggling school in Doncaster.

“By the end it felt that whatever you did was never enough,” he says. “I haven’t looked back since. The pub is hard work but there is hardly any stress compared to teaching.

“I was lucky, but I saw so many colleagues struggle with mental health problems brought on by the job. The pressure was immense – and sooner or later it caught up with most of them.”

Allen isn’t alone in turning his back on teaching. The profession is experiencing an unprecedented exodus, with the number of teachers quitting having risen by 25 per cent over the last five years. The proportion of those choosing to leave ahead of retirement has jumped from 64 per cent to 75 per cent.

Despite spending £700m every year on training, the Government has failed to reach its own goals for recruitment for four consecutive years. The upshot is that the recorded rate of vacancies and temporarily filled positions has more than doubled. With a million more children set to enter state education by 2022, the profession appears to be nearing crisis point.

For Allen, it was the feeling he was fighting a losing battle that eventually told. His school was identified by the Labour government as one of 638 nationwide where less than 30 per cent of students achieved five A* to Cs in GCSEs including English and maths. As such it was targeted under then schools secretary Ed Balls’ National Challenge initiative to drive up standards.

Allen says he took over the school’s maths department at “rock bottom” but eventually succeeded in pushing the rate up to 62 per cent, above the national average. Even so, it didn’t seem enough for the authorities.

“You were under constant scrutiny from one organisation or another,” he says. “The National Challenge people were mainly supportive but you were always working under their shadow and that of Ofsted.

“When we had an inspection they weren’t bothered that we had improved results, it was all about which section of the cohort hadn’t achieved the target. It became all about exams and not what pupils had learned, especially when the Government changed.”

Allen says his department spent two years preparing a GCSE curriculum, only for it to go out of the window once Michael Gove became Education Secretary in 2010.

“There is constant tinkering and I just wasn’t prepared to give any more of myself. I couldn’t have continued doing what I was until I was 65. Fortunately it was just me and my partner so we could take a risk – and I’m so glad we did.”

Fiona Meleschko was director of the primary phase at an all-through school in Bradford but left the profession after starting a family in a bid to achieve some semblance of a work-life balance.

“I would be at school for 6.30am and was still sitting in the classroom at 9.30pm,” says the 35-year-old, from Shelf, near Halifax, who spent 15 years in teaching and is mother to nine-month-old son Tadhg and four-year-old daughter Áine.

“I would have an hour with my daughter if I was lucky and found myself willing her to go to sleep so I could get on with my work. Then I’d be on the computer until 11pm.

“I look back and wonder, when did I actually enjoy my job? As a newly qualified teacher I loved it but slowly but surely the expectations and workload built up. There was so much paperwork and box-ticking.

“Things like marking policies were forever changing. The time I spent in the classroom was getting in the way of what I had to do outside it, which was sad because that’s why I entered teaching in the first place.”

She now runs the Calderdale franchise of Sling Swing, which offers dance classes for parents with babies in slings and baby carriers. The career change has put pressure on the family’s finances, but husband Luke, an engineer, has been fully supportive and apart from one day a week’s supply teaching, she has no intention of going back to her previous career.

“I felt like I was drowning under all the work,” she says. “I would never get to the end of a to-do list. The stress was becoming too much. If I had stayed in the profession I’m not sure I’d have seen 40.”

Those who are still in teaching talk of widespread disillusionment as pay increases are frozen at one per cent until 2020 while the demands of the job continue to rise. A survey conducted by the National Union of Teachers towards the end of last year found that more than half of teachers in England are thinking of quitting in the next two years, with 61 per cent of them blaming workload and 57 per cent wanting a better work-life balance.

Kate (not her real name) is a secondary school teacher in Hull. She has seen a succession of colleagues leave the profession, while those who remain talk openly of switching careers. Currently on maternity leave, she intends to return to her role but is unsure how long she will stay. She lays the blame at the door of a government that keeps shifting the goalposts and the suffocating scrutiny that teachers find themselves under.

“There are endless targets that will suddenly change halfway through the year. There is constant pressure from senior management to improve and bring in all these new initiatives without any of the existing ones being taken away. But then they’re under pressure themselves.”

Simon Barber, headteacher of Holy Trinity, a through school in Barnsley for pupils aged three to 16, has sympathy for teachers and says expectations of them have risen, along with levels of accountability.

Plunging morale, combined with the Government’s introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) performance measure for schools, awarded when students secure a grade C or above at GCSE level across a core of five academic subjects, means recruitment for a school like his is trickier than ever.

“Since 2014 we’ve advertised 18 teaching jobs and for 10 of them we had fewer than three applicants,” he says. “It has become dog eat dog and I do worry that we will find the teachers we need in those specialist subjects.

“Teaching is a fantastic job and an incredible privilege, but it comes with huge pressure. We had a brilliant art teacher who left the profession because she just couldn’t cope.

“When I started in 1991 there was no such thing as Ofsted,” he adds. “The evidence shows that standards have improved but it’s about maintaining those standards without teachers burning out. That’s the real challenge for schools now.”

The scramble to leave profession

In the 12 months to November 2014, the state sector lost nearly 50,000 teachers – representing the highest rate of exit for a decade and an increase of more than 25 per cent over five years.

At the last count, the number of temporarily filled teacher posts stood at 3,210, up from 2,300 the year before.

The number of teachers working without a formal teaching qualification – permitted in academies and free schools – was just over 20,000, up from 16,600.

100,000 qualified teachers have opted never to work in a classroom at all.

Four in 10 teachers quit within a year of qualifying and an NUT survey found than more than half of teachers are considering leaving.