British schools are reporting a classroom crisis, with thousands of disaffected teachers leaving the profession, and new graduates discouraged from training because of the daily stress and grind. And with the number of state school pupils set to rise by a million by 2022, the problem is only getting worse

Jacquie Sainsbury left secondary school in Canvey Island, Essex around 30 years ago with one O-level. She had five kids before deciding to train as a teacher. In 2000, she left Derby University with a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE), and nine years later, she became the head of Brookhill Leys primary school in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. I meet her there on a Monday afternoon: she and her deputy show me round before we sit down in her office and unpick exactly what it takes to make a success of a 430-pupil school in what she describes as “a very tough area”.

Eastwood sits in the heart of what used to be the Nottinghamshire coalfield. The last pit here closed in 1985, and the scars have yet to heal. “We’re in the bottom 20% of the deprivation indicators in the country,” Sainsbury tells me. “A lot of poverty.” She and her staff have to cope with regular challenges. “It’s not unusual for our teachers to be shouted at by parents; to have to deal with drunk parents,” she says. “The things that our staff have to deal with, you don’t have to deal with in an everyday walk of life. We’ve got fantastic parents, and we’ve got parents who need a lot of help.”

Brookhill Leys, it has to be said, does not feel like a “problem” school. Just over 45% of the children receive free school meals, compared with a national average of 16%; around a third are understood to have special educational needs of some kind. But walking around its airy, ordered classrooms, and watching everything from instruction in charcoal drawing to an avoidant 10-year-old who has just exited his classroom agree to make amends and go back in, the sense of something quietly remarkable is obvious. A good school is something you can sense inside five minutes. And this is one – with, for what it’s worth, a “good” rating from the school inspectorate Ofsted to match.

It’s not unusual for our teachers to have to deal with drunk parents

But for Sainsbury and her colleagues, things are getting harder, in the midst of what repeated headlines bluntly describe as a teacher shortage. When Sainsbury used to advertise a job vacancy, she got around 25 applications, which would then be whittled down to a shortlist of five. “Now we’re lucky if we get five applications,” she says. “A teacher needs to suit a school. Sometimes, we can get a teacher in, and think, ‘They’re really going to struggle here.’ But then you’ll get another one and think: ‘Yep – they’re going to fit in.’ We don’t get that choice at the moment.” Last year, she advertised for a teacher and received just one application – at which point, she decided to fill the gap with a young trainee.

While the level of new applicants shrinks, increasing numbers of teachers are getting out. Over the last four years, around eight teachers have left Brookhill Leys: more than double the number Sainsbury would normally expect. “We’ve got one at the moment who started in September at management level, and she’s just decided she doesn’t want to be a teacher any more. She says that compared with the school she worked at in London, her workload here is better. But she’s had enough of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pupils at Brookhill Leys Primary School, Eastwood, Notts. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Some of the factors behind stories like these are traceable to the New Labour years, but many are rooted in Michael Gove’s hyperactive four-year reign as education secretary. They go from never-ending paperwork, to a constantly changing regime of exams and assessments. Meanwhile, the prospect of a visit from Ofsted and the possibility of a bad inspection are a constant source of stress – not least because a “requires improvement” or the dread “inadequate” rating will mean even more upheaval.

On top of all that are the effects of the pay policy which froze teachers salaries for three years from 2010, and recently capped rises for most teachers at 1% until 2020. As any maths teacher could tell you, that means pay cuts in real terms – and more disaffection, as wages in the private sector start ticking up.

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“I’ve noticed that a lot of headteachers aren’t even bothering to advertise jobs any more,” Sainsbury says. “There’s a round-robin email that gets circulated, and a head will say, ‘Does anyone know of a teacher who’s available for September?’ No one will give an answer, but you’ll get four or five others who jump in on the back of it, going, ‘I’m looking for someone, too.’ I’ve never seen that before. Schools are desperate. They’re getting to the end of term, and they haven’t got anybody.

What is happening at Brookhill Leys is only one small part of a snowballing national story. The government insists that across England, teacher numbers and vacancy rates remain relatively stable, but even the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, acknowledges that there are some problems. Moreover, things look set to get worse. In 2022, the number of children in state schools will stand at just over eight million compared with seven million today.

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 – which, let’s not forget, is allowed in academies and free schools – was just over 20,000, up from 16,600. The government’s own research shows that in the 12 months to November 2014, the state sector lost nearly 50,000 teachers – representing the highest rate of exit for 10 years and an increase of more than 25% over five years. More sobering still, 100,000 qualified teachers have opted never to work in a classroom at all.

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In 2015, the number of graduates entering teacher training did go up – but it had fallen by a total of 14% over the previous four years. Among new trainee teachers, subjects such as physics and design and technology (or D&T) remain massively under-subscribed. The number of trainee teachers based in universities or colleges is falling, in keeping with the government’s controversial push to place aspiring teachers with schools, rather than higher education institutions. And here too, there are problems: the main programme aimed at training teachers that way is called School Direct, and it seems to have had consistent issues with a lack of take-up: in 2015, only 54% of the places set aside for new graduates were filled. (A DfE spokesperson says that the government has purposely over-inflated such target figures to signal their ambitions for the policy, and “just because we don’t hit that target, it doesn’t mean that’s a shortage.”)

A recent survey by the National Association of Headteachers found that 59% of schools advertising for staff had “struggled” to recruit, and 20% had failed completely. In London and the home counties, there seem to be acute problems caused by soaring house prices: one north London headteacher recently told me that some of his staff commute 50 miles. But judging by rising noise from schools all over England, the truth is that the teacher crisis is starting to hit pretty much everywhere, and affecting every level of the profession. Two weeks ago, the education charity the Future Leaders Trust added to the angst surrounding teaching with a report warning that schools were finding it increasingly hard to recruit headteachers, and that 28% of current heads had told one survey they were planning to leave their jobs within five years.

The DfE’s response to all this has a slightly conflicted tone. It insists that “teaching has a lower turnover rate than the economy as a whole”, and that “90% of teachers in state schools stay in the profession from one year to the next”. Talk of a crisis, it says, is “disingenuous and misleading”, and it goes on to bemoan “scaremongering”. But the DfE apparently does “recognise the challenges that some school leaders face in particular areas” – and says it has increased bursaries and scholarships to try to attract recruits in “priority subjects”, as well as creating the National Teaching Service: a new scheme aimed at sending 1,500 teachers and “middle leaders” to schools deemed “underperforming” by 2020.1

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Education secretary Nicky Morgan. Photograph: Mark Thomas/REX/Shutterstock

The central problem, though, is that nothing the government has proposed so far has allayed rising fears of the teacher shortage turning critical very soon – not on the part of political mischief-makers, but people who work in schools all over the country.

The same day I meet Jacquie Sainsbury, I speak to two ex-teachers. Nicola Deegan worked for 11 years as a French and Spanish teacher in the hard-pressed Merseyside suburb of Kirkby: at first, she says, she and her colleagues were given “a bit of creative control” over how they taught, and the workload seemed manageable. Soon enough, though, more and more time was eaten up by paperwork and marking based on individual targets for each student – “a box-ticking exercise” – that entailed two hours’ extra work each night, another couple of hours on Saturday mornings, and more time each Sunday, stretching into the evening.

Deegan took a year’s maternity leave in 2010, and came back to find that her workload had been ratcheted up yet further. “People didn’t seem to have time to breathe,” she says. “It was as though they wanted to get through the teaching day as quickly as possible because they knew how much other work they had to do. You’d think: ‘Oh, three more lessons to go – then I can tackle those mails, and that marking, and those assessments.’” She soon cut her hours to three days a week, but found herself working an unpaid extra day just to on top of things. “Part-time teaching is all the accountability and all the guilt for half the pay,” she says.

Deegan left her job in July last year. She now does a day-and-a half-of language teaching in primary schools, as well as some supply teaching – and earns just over half of what she used to. “For a long time, teaching was my identity: that was who I was,” she says. “But I won’t be going back to full-time teaching, or even part-time. Not a chance.”

Another former teacher, who prefers to remain anonymous, tells me she qualified in Scotland in 2007, and eventually took a job as a geography teacher in Sutton, in south London, paying £550 a month to share a flat with two other people. Her working day began at 7.30am, and she was responsible for 13 different classes, with all the associated paperwork. In an attempt to avoid burnout, she moved to Manchester and started supply teaching, before taking a full-time, £28,000-a-year job in Bolton, where the number of her classes increased.

If somebody had said, ‘You can have 60 grand a year to stay,’ I would still have said no

“I started in September 2012, and by December, I was diagnosed with depression, brought on by stress,” she says. She left teaching when she became pregnant and resolved not to go back. She now works for a children’s charity: “If somebody had said, ‘You can have 60 grand a year to stay,’ I would still have said no,” she says.

This sense of grind and impossible demands inevitably trickles down to trainee teachers. Andy Howes, who is in charge of secondary-school PCGE courses at Manchester University, tells me that stress about paperwork and marking is something that he regularly has to deal with. “It’s the day-to-day grind of some school policies that some trainees find difficult,” he says. “We have quite a lot of conversations with trainees, to say, ‘If that’s the situation, don’t stay. Find somewhere else.’ It’s a constant thread, definitely.”

Another factor, he says, is the government’s drive, chiefly via the School Direct programme, to push down the number of trainees based in universities and colleges, encouraging graduates to locate themselves in individual schools. “You have to decide: ‘Well, which school, or school partnership, do I want to put my trust in?’” he says. “You don’t know what you’re looking at as a graduate because you’ve not got the experience … I think that’s probably led to some people deciding that teaching’s not for them.”

He echoes concerns about subjects such as maths and the sciences feeling the pinch. “I think that’s a combination of the economy picking up, and the fact there’s just not that straightforward route into teaching,” he says. Howes runs a course for people who haven’t got degrees in physics – an A-level is the basic requirement – but want to become physics teachers. “The number of schools I’m working with who haven’t got properly trained physics teachers is massive,” he says. “You just keep coming across the fact that trainees are working with teachers who are not themselves trained in physics.” It takes me a while to process what this means, in some cases: people without physics degrees being helped to teach physics by people who don’t have physics degrees either.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Barber, headteacher at Holy Trinity School in Barnsley … ‘If the maths department goes down, the whole school goes down.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The day after my trip to Eastwood, I arrive at another school in the middle of a former coalfield: Holy Trinity in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, a Catholic and Church of England school whose 1,150 pupils range in age from three to 16. The head here is 46-year-old Simon Barber: a one-time primary school teacher with a specialism in music – he plays the viola – who now manages 43 secondary school teachers, and 17 who work at primary level. The school – overseen by the local council, rather than being an academy – opened in 2012, and sits on a giant site, with buildings and classrooms that exude a sense of confidence and purpose in difficult circumstances. “We’re still emerging,” Barber tells me. “I don’t think we’re the finished article yet.”

At the end of last year, Barnsley was one of 13 places – just about all of them in the north, and also including Blackpool, Doncaster and Hartlepool – that Ofsted chief Michael Wilshaw said had too many schools “languishing in mediocrity”. Holy Trinity, in fact, has a “good” Ofsted rating, but Barber obviously thinks such a sweeping judgment caused nothing but problems, particularly when it comes to recruiting new teachers.

Barber hands me a sheet of paper recording all the vacancies he has advertised over the last few years, and how many applications he got back. A job teaching art attracted 18 – because, he says, thanks to the changes pushed through by the government, “schools are now actively reducing numbers of art teachers”, and many are going spare. By contrast, the numbers of people applying for jobs teaching English, science and computing never got any higher than four – and appointing a new head of maths, he says, was “an absolute nightmare”.

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Finding heads of departments, he says, is a particular problem, what with Ofsted ready to pounce, and results in key subjects so crucial for a school’s reputation: “If you’re the head of maths or the head of English, you are so accountable: if the maths department goes down, the whole school goes down.” For this job, the school got four applications, three of which were “no good”, leaving one that he says was outstanding. The applicant came from a large academy chain, which for some reason, had given her a poor reference.

“We couldn’t understand it – what we could see in front of us, and what the reference said were completely at odds with each other,” he says. He decided to employ her, and she accepted – but a few weeks before the end of term, he received a call saying she wouldn’t take the job after all. “The next thing I know, this chain was announcing its new head of maths in a brand-new academy,” he says. “Presumably, they offered her a better deal.” He suddenly looks pained. “I feel like the corner shop up against Tesco. These academy chains have huge resources, and lots of lots of schools. I won’t appoint anyone I don’t think is capable of doing the job. That would still be my official line. But the truth is, you do find yourself thinking: if I don’t appoint this person and I advertise again, that’s going to cost me another £3,500 when money is really tight.”

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A couple of years ago, he says, he lost one of his art teachers. “She was absolutely brilliant,” he says. “The kids loved art; she switched them on to it. I was loving it, seeing kids wanting to do art, and doing really well in the exams. And then she said: ‘I can’t cope with it. I go home every night, and I cry.’ She got out of teaching and she’s doing something completely different now.

It’s a small story: one regrettable episode in the midst of thousands. But in all kinds of ways, it means a lot. “She was an absolutely amazing teacher,” he says, quietly. “A massive loss.”