Why are teachers leaving education? With England having one of the youngest teaching workforces in the OECD, especially at primary level, it is hard to know whether to celebrate or despair.
Clearly things seem to be going well with recruiting new, young teachers into the profession, yet it is strange that so many of our more experienced teachers are leaving in such large numbers. We need to act urgently to eradicate some of the causes of high turnover and ensure that wisdom and experience is not being lost but being effectively spread around the school system. When you look in detail, the figures for the 31 OECD countries are stark. With 20% of our secondary teachers aged under 30, we have the second youngest workforce after Indonesia. In the primary sector we have a massive 31% of teachers in this age bracket, way ahead of second-ranked Belgium with 22%.
The positions are similar if you look at the proportions of teachers under 40. So where are all of our more mature teachers going? Planning a lesson sequence; observing a lesson sequence. I used to be Deputy Head at Alexandra Park School in Haringey.
We opened the school in 1999 with just 162 Year 7s and 11 members of staff. We called ourselves ‘The First XI’ for a while..until the staff who joined later got sick of it! For the first few years, while we could afford it, we ran a two-day residential for all staff where we engaged in a superb process of ethos-building and strategic thinking. It played an important role in creating a strong collective view of pedagogy, attitudes to discipline, inclusion, aspirations and many other things. At the very first event we worked on a common view of what learning should look like.
Whole-class teaching: This was core. “This is an essential element in providing cohesion to differentiated, multi-task schemes of work and providing a sense of inclusiveness for all students within mixed ability classes. And so on. The Learning Arc ..which may span many lessons Any single lesson exists in wider context. And so on… Like this: Like Loading... Even Better If we specifically focused on What Went Well. Over the past few months, I have been fortunate enough to work in a wide variety of contexts around the country with fabulously open and highly reflective practitioners.
Of late, I have been involved in engaging and often very challenging debates around the ways in which all forms of observations are used in schools to improve the learning experiences of young people. One of the main areas of my work is concerned with how to develop and sustain a safe and effective culture of quality professional reflection. An integral aspect of this involves the design of dynamic professional development programmes that integrate a culture of coaching, action research and developmental lesson observations. This includes: An often neglected area of the process of all forms of observation is the post-observation conversation*. Quality post-lesson conversations We can employ as much reassurance as we can think of in the form of… ‘It really IS developmental, there are no judgements here’ OR… Scorpion feedback.
Articles > Leading lessons - Leader Magazine. Four years ago, when our headteacher, Glen Martin, stood up and said, “I want this school to become a school of leaders,” I could not have predicted what this would come to mean for the school.
I’m not entirely sure he could have done either. In September 2012, Shenley Brook End School in Milton Keynes welcomed ASCL General Secretary Brian Lightman to open our new leadership and training centre (LTC). Brian said, “This is about ensuring the best possible education for young people. International research shows that the quality of teaching is the single most important factor in making sure that young people succeed at school. That’s why a centre like this is so important.” The LTC provides a high-quality training environment within a school and my full-time commitment as its principal. I sometimes say that for our own staff it is an opportunity to go from the classroom to the hotel without getting in the car. These schools are engaging us in quite a debate. Improving Teaching Not Simply Measuring It.