Who’s in Front of the Class?

 Creative Commons Attribution

I’ve seen a lot of comments recently about the dilemma of not having enough teachers to cover classes. The situation is clearly dire in many schools/areas and does not seem to be resolving anytime soon. And the smaller the school, the closer to this pain point becomes the principal.

Maybe I’m biased because I’m inside the education game, but there does seem to be a unique situation involved in the way our schools are organised i.e.  25 students + 1 teacher.

Subtract the teacher and the 25 children are still coming. Every one of them is a partially formed little human and they do not fit into an in-tray which means they can’t be temporarily stored, paused, or ignored.

I’m struggling to think of a comparable workplace.

When a doctor is unwell, their appointments are cancelled. When an engineer is absent, their work is paused or diverted. When an Auditor is short of staff, the audits are delayed.

But your 25 eager, energetic young people are still going to walk through the school gate at 8:30am and they’re not leaving until 3pm. Regardless of whether their teacher is present or not, they still carry their usual ‘baggage’ – anxiety, autism, social quirks, dysregulation . . . and your staffing issue is not going to change any of that. It’s not their problem.

Which is where a choice has to be made, and the options are finite:

Find a reliever

SLT teach them

Split the class

You teach them

Finding relievers – in our region this is difficult if there’s lots of lead time (think weeks) and impossible at short notice. The increase in CRT and lack of local, trained teachers means that on some days there are simply no relievers available. Not a single one.

SLT teaching – if your school is big enough, there may be people released to do other work. Once every so often this is a reasonable ask, but not regularly and not if you’re in a small school where everyone is already teaching a class.

Splitting the class – this is definitely a last choice solution. Dropping extra children into someone else’s class crowds the students in it, takes teaching time away from the teacher, and is essentially just child minding for the day. The anxious or disruptive children don’t leave that behind either. (In secondary schools it often goes the other way – they combine several classes with one adult supervising, again, simply child minding.)

You do it – we’ve written about this before (To Teach or Not to Teach) but in a nutshell, this solution is at the very end of the list. By choosing to teach when you should be acting in a leadership role, you are also choosing to stop work on all other aspects of your job. This has real downstream effects not the least of which is the stress it adds to yourself as you fall further and further behind in your actual job.

And perhaps the real problem is that the general public have no idea that this issue is system wide, every day. Your compromises shelter them from reality.

Perhaps it is time that we let them know.

Dave