I am serious: teachers need to be disloyal more often if they want their careers to grow and their working terms and conditions to be healthy.

Ask yourself; if you stay with your car insurance provider, bank, phone, TV, car breakdown, electric or gas provider or any other provider – are you rewarded for your loyalty? No. Instead, you are seen as a cash cow. Every time you roll over the insurance or keep your ISA unchanged what happens? They up your premium. They lower your interest rate paid. The people getting the best deals are those shopping around. It isn’t actually necessary to switch. You simply get yourself a fresh quotation, pick up the phone and call your current provider asking to be put through to ‘cancellations’. Once there, you cite your fresh quotation and offer them the opportunity to match it. If you can’t be bothered to do this for any of your providers, then you only have yourself to blame when they raise their prices just for you and not the others.

And now the same is true for teachers. You need to be shopping around for schools. There are many schools that are very keen to recruit. They have a shortage of teachers and a shortage of teachers who will take the stress and accountability of Teaching and Learning Responsibilities. They might offer you an extra point on their payscale – just for coming to work for them. They might offer you a TLR responsibility which enhances your career. They might inflate your position: Assistant Headteacher status and you only have to be a Head of Department?  They are incentivising it for you. But are they doing this for the staff they already have? Not always, no. Ms Loyal Teacher is often looked over for that TLR. She will have to fight hard for the pay progression and then half the time not actually get a payrise – the school simply can’t afford it. However, if you are a good teacher and you get a good offer – well along you go to the SLT and see if they will match the offer.

Now I must point out that I don’t agree with this. Teachers who see a year group all the way through their time in the school are worth their weight in gold. Pupils like it, parents like it and yes, teachers like it. The best behaviour management, the most accurate differentiation and the best teaching comes from those who have taught the same children all the way through their school journey as part of a stable teaching team. The quality of relationship between the teacher, the children and the families of those children really does drive a better experience for all. Indeed, many teachers and dare I say it utility bill payers, would be much happier with a system that rewarded loyalty not disloyalty.

However, just like we have to be disloyal with our insurance, banks, utilities and other providers, so we now need to be disloyal with our school employers. Hopefully, it just takes calling the cancellation hotline to get you better working conditions, but what is the truth? I change home insurance, utility providers and the like just as regularly as I keep the provider after shopping around. The game has changed and teachers who stay in the same school are not doing their careers and working conditions any favours. It used to be that you would stay in the school and earn the right for extra money or responsibility. Now you need to leave, shop around and find new school employers who appreciate your fine teaching skills. For a year or two anyway.

Update:

Since publishing this blog we have seen the Dfes report come out which shows fewer teachers in the profession which is being driven by those leaving the profession not being offset by those entering the profession. The NFER blog shows that in particular, it is those teachers of working age leaving, not retirees that are causing the issue. The number of teachers aged 50+ has gone down from 23% to 17% in 2017. The question now is whether it is a normal part of modern culture to move around, not just within education, but from education to other industries. Certainly, maths and physics teachers are leaving teaching to earn more money elsewhere according to Sam Sims at Datalab.

Is the answer to incentivise those in the profession to stay in the profession? To stay in their schools? Currently, we are incentivising entrants to the profession to enter and only 67% of them are staying. Could some of that money be better spent elsewhere? Could those who stay in the profession for a very long time be rewarded with an earlier pension age? Could we award some kind of pecuniary bonus for those who achieve lengthy landmarks of time in a school or the profession?

Part of the problem has to be that some people think that headteachers are ‘moving staff on’ to help balance the books or because they feel staff have stagnated and need moving on. These people are the most expensive teachers at the top of the UPS band. Could the dreaded ‘capability’ rule be amended to afford more protection for those at the top of the scale when or if they stagnate? Laura McInerney says: “It’s not just about stagnation, I think you can become a less good teacher if you are given a bonkers timetable, an unsupportive department lead or zero resources.”  Whether it is true or not, the image that older experienced teachers are being pushed out of schools could mean some are jumping rather than waiting to be pushed – and jumping right out of the profession.

Keeping teachers in the profession and spending less doing so is a goal that unites the political spectrum. The drumbeat is firmly on entrants at the moment, but we have got see it is more than workload that is driving teachers out of the profession.