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The Recruitment Crisis: An RQTs Perspective

Crisis? What Crisis?   At this very moment the newest cohort of PGCE students may have received their places, are doing preparatory reading, organising a work placement before they get started. They are walking into a profession in turmoil, I sometimes wonder just how aware of it they are.  Media Barrage Almost every time I see an article about teaching in any major media publication (not including bloggers etc.) there is substantial media coverage, an unrelenting barrage almost, of negativity about the profession: recruitment crisis , teacher burnout , ill thought out government policies , the list goes on. The recruitment crisis is real, there is no denying this. More experienced colleagues tell me anecdotally that now classes are bigger than they ever have been (which is backed up in numerous sources ). Universities are not filling up all PGCE spaces, factoring in drop out rates and the number of teachers who never make the classroom after gaining QTS. What can we do abou
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Broadened Curriculums, stronger relationships and more enjoyable teaching

Background I recently took the decision to move schools, this has been a difficult process for me and the final few weeks at my school exposed some emotional ties I didn’t even recognise I had with colleagues and students (more on this in a later blog). The one event I’d like to highlight is a visit I took to my school’s production of Evita. After telling my year 11s it would be unlikely that I would be going to their prom for various reasons I promised I would go watch the school production which many of them performed in. On This Night of a Thousand Stars I was fortunate enough to be able to help talk to a few students backstage before the production, instantly I knew there was something not quite tangible in the air: something, for lack of a less clich é d term, magical. The look of excitement on the students faces was invigorating, the anticipation was mounting: makeup was being applied, hair fixed, lines rehearsed, nerves raised and consequently settled. I left th
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The Best Years of Your Life?

‘We had it harder when I was younger’ People of a certain generation seem to wear this as though it is a badge of honour, the pride they take in surviving a terrible system makes it so they cannot comprehend that students now also have it hard. Social Media The power of social media in modern society is undeniable, many students are actually addicted to using their mobile phones and with this come numerous issues that just didn’t exist when I was younger. Access to phones allows every mistake, every comment, every awkward situation to be immortalised and shared across the world. This may even haunt them in the future – the recent raft of comments from people in high-profile posts or celebrities coming back to haunt them is a clear example of this. Constant communication and the cloak of annonymity phones can afford result in bullying to reach more students more regularly: where home used to be a safe space it, sadly, is no longer is a refuge from bullies. At the time of wr
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Why weren't you there?

Reading time - 5 mins Keynote Speech – Baronness Estelle Morris As we filed into the room to take our seats I could sense a real energy and purpose about the place, many were present who had battled through treacherous conditions to get to the venue epitomising their dedication to their craft. I could dedicate an entire blog to this keynote speech, but I will stick to the key takeaways. ‘Research has the significant power to change education, if we have the passion, ambition and the knowledge’ This is based on the idea of teaching as a profession having a shared body knowledge that is evidence based, so that new teachers don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel but can stand on the shoulders of the giants that preceded them. If we want to truly progress ourselves as teachers and the profession, we need to be the next set of shoulders upon which the next generation of educators will stand. ‘What makes a movement?’ Estelle also discussed the feeling she had that evide
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Feeding the Beast

‘There is no such thing as a selfless good deed’ The Beginning I still greatly cherish one of my earliest teaching moments- as a teaching assistant I had taken a student for some intervention on the structure of the atom, I also happened to scribe for this student in his chemistry GCSE. Despite him struggling in other sections of the exam, when it came to the question about the atom he got almost all of it right! I struggled to hold back my reaction as he reeled off correct answers one after the other. The pure exhilaration was something I had rarely experienced in life, my smile beamed as I left the exam. I sincerely hoped that the student had passed his exam, and I was in a state of euphoria about having contributed in my own way, no matter how small.  I’d had my first hit of teaching. The Obsession Since then almost my entire life has been consumed in the pursuit of feeding the beast. Ingesting educational twitter and books, attending conferences at weekends, communicat
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