Who would want to be a teacher in the current climate? - David Behrens

I blanched at the details because Behrens Junior is a qualified maths teacher and it was me who encouraged him to become one. I told him it would be a job for life. I didn’t think it would be life or death.

He saw the light before I did. He trained at a sink school in Lancashire where they needed wardens, not teachers, and he soon calculated that he could put his love of maths to better use by writing computer code. That in a nutshell is why maths teachers especially are in such short supply right across the country.

I told him he’d made the right choice. You want a career for your children that will enhance their lives, not suck the life out of them.

But while it was true that some of his pupils were less well behaved than the inhabitants of the nearby Knowsley Safari Park, it wasn’t solely a question of classroom discipline – for the assault on teachers’ sanity comes from many directions. Obsessive administration, inflexible curricula, overzealous regulation; who wants to take on so much grief for so little money?

Teaching is one of the professions most fundamental to society and it should be one of the most respected. But in today’s Britain that’s not the case. Perhaps it’s inevitable; we all had teachers we didn’t like. And we envy the long holidays they get.

But that doesn’t explain why, in a poll of NASUWT members, 84 per cent said they had experienced a rise in work-related stress in the last year; one in four was drinking more and one in eight was taking pills for depression. Three per cent of teachers said they had self-harmed in the last 12 months because of work.

The findings are borne out elsewhere. Daniel Kebede of the National Education Union, said on Wednesday that morale among teachers was at an “all-time low”. Nearly one in 10 had left the profession before retirement last year and if the trend went unchecked education would simply grind to a halt.

“There is a mood of desperation, if we are being honest,” Mr Kebede concluded.

Yet despite all this, the government continues to sit on its hands. “Our plan to ensure every child benefits from a world-class education is working,” parroted a spokesperson at the Department of Education who had obviously never been near Knowsley.

And, by the way, what’s the point of government spokespeople anyway? Why spend public money on spin merchants to peddle platitudes on behalf of some minister and then say the opposite when the next one takes over? Let’s scrap the lot of them and watch them try to put a positive spin on that.

The most troubling case of ministerial inertia currently facing teachers is the controversy surrounding Ofsted, the regulator whose single-word judgements on schools, from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ cause more stress among staff than almost anything. Nine out of 10 teachers do not believe such definitions are a fair reflection of a school’s performance.

What’s more, time that should be spent helping pupils is being squandered on preparing for visits from inspectors, with ludicrous ‘mocksted’ exercises adding to teachers’ workload.

The culture of fear Ofsted radiates has become so prevalent that almost no-one in the profession still believes it to be a reliable and trusted arbiter of standards or that it acts independently of government. That’s quite an indictment.

And while school inspections are important for parents it doesn’t give inspectors to behave like Post Office bosses, imposing their own twisted sense of justice on people just trying to do their best with the hand they’ve been dealt.

So it’s easy to see why Mr Kebede’s union wants to see Ofsted scrapped and replaced with a new system of inspection. It would be easily accomplished, too; quangos can be created and killed with the stroke of a ministerial pen and consigning this one to history would send a signal that the government has teachers’ backs.

As this seems not to be the case, one has to wonder where the next generation of educators is going to come from. Not from my family, I’m afraid.