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Why are teachers leaving the profession in droves, and what can we do about it?
Department for Education figures reveal that in the 12 months to November 2014 almost 50,000 qualified teachers in England left the state sector. As the RSA Academies Teaching School Alliance launches its own initial teacher training scheme, we are gathering an expert panel to ask how we can ensure that teaching continues to be an attractive career choice that recruits and retains bright, creative and passionate people to the profession.
With almost one in ten of all teachers leaving the profession, an increasingly complicated and fragmented Initial Teacher Training landscape, more financially appealing private sector alternatives, and a substantial increase in the number of children entering the school system, a perfect storm of negatives is brewing. Working alongside RSA Academies and the University of Warwick, we will bring together a panel of experts to explore the varied issues around the impending teacher recruitment crisis.
How have the reforms to teacher training impacted this issue? What role has the introduction of tuition fees played? Should we be looking to recruit from abroad? Members of the panel will discuss these questions and more, exploring the stories behind the statistics and offering their own potential solutions to this pressing issue.
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Is it time to consider recreating the RSA examinations and syllabus?
Good question. However, I would be more sympathetic to teachers wanting to attend something like this, and being allowed to book time off to attend such an event, if they, as a group, were more reasonable and sympathetic to parents wanting to take their children out of class, for a couple of weeks a year, to go on holiday, for example.
Teachers and schools are themselves under massive pressure set by politicians to hit targets on attendance and academic performance.
Perhaps we need broader targets of child development and well-being in order to fully appreciate the full role that time with parents plays in children's lives.
I would love to see learning to be an effective learner and well balanced person on the curriculum - I am sure that technology will soon make this accessible to all with monitoring various aspects of bio-data and learning to manage it in order to optimise health, well-being and learning.
Thus teachers, parents and students could all develop better balanced lives.
Could a video/audio be posted online so we can catch up when we get home? :)
Any video or audio, made available online, should include the question, answers and discussion session, at the end of the actual formal programme.
Hi all,
Many thanks for these comments. You will be able to listen to the event live or as a podcast, which will be uploaded onto the website and will include the question and answer session at the end of the talk.
With regards to the timing of the event, we take your comments on board and will attempt to address this for any future events that would clearly be of interest to those who work in schools.
Why is this being held at 13:00? How are those directly affected by this (i.e. teachers!) meant to attend!
With respect, whilst I know that the *causes* of the recruitment and retention crisis (workload, behaviour, alienation, pressure, etc) most directly affect teachers, this seems to be an event for the people most directly affected by the *outcomes* of the recruitment and retention crisis ... i.e. the students and their parents. I for one, am glad to have an event on this I can go to in my lunch break for once, instead of after hours (i.e. a TeachMeet) or at the weekend (i.e. a Festival of Education), and I very much look forward to it.