One of the many mysteries of education is why teacher training is so unbearably miserable. It doesn’t have to be. Great schools are lots of fun to learn in, for both the kids and newbie teachers. Nevertheless, my very rough estimate is that about 40-50% of PGCE placements are awful experiences. From diminutive women having chairs thrown at them on their first day to job-sharing mentors offering completely contradictory advice, you get plenty of student teachers who come back saying they learned absolutely nothing about teaching, and only a little about good crowd control.
The problem is bad and getting worse. The 5-year retention rate is now down below 70%, and this statistic doesn’t even include attrition amongst student teachers. This has a few different knock-on effects: we might expect that a younger teacher workforce will be less good, because teachers acquire expertise slowly over the course of their careers, and low retention also puts extra demand on recruitment. The more teachers you lose the more new teachers you have to find, which is only really easy when the economy is in recession and people look for a safe job. Even then you quite often wind up with shortages in subjects like secondary maths and physics, and modern foreign languages.
By and large the problem isn’t caused by the universities. They do their best, but there just aren’t enough good placements to go around. I have heard of some bad practice on their end - such as the course that apparently advised one cohort of primary trainees to break up with their boyfriends before the course began, because you couldn’t both maintain a relationship and survive teacher training - but overall they aren’t the problem, which firmly lies in schools.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, you get violence, chaos, and schools deliberately dumping student teachers in the very worst classrooms just to have one more body available to do crowd control (no, I can’t prove this happens). More often shit placements just involve a lot of wasted time, exhausting late nights, and endlessly rewritten lesson plans. The result is too many NQTs going into their first year somewhere between “already a bit burned out” and “easily diagnosable with PTSD”. Perhaps the most upsetting bit of the whole thing is that plenty of “mentors” simply don’t care, and some seem to actively relish the suffering of the noobs. It’s a hazing culture, with psychological breakdown and reconstruction as the more-or-less explicit end goal.
The existence of widespread hazing is not something you’d expect to find in education, and especially in the parts of education-world that have a 90% percent female workforce (like primary). I don’t particularly claim to understand all that well where it’s coming from, but here are some ideas:
Accountability pressures. Teacher mentors that feel themselves pushed to get good test scores might well not be inclined to devote much time to mentoring students well, or indeed might not want to do any mentoring at all. Although there’s no evidence student teachers have negative effects on the outcomes of the children they work with, more experienced teachers under a lot of pressure could think otherwise.
Ethical collapse. Lost in chaos of their environment, experienced teachers in tough schools become callous, desensitized, and lose their moral compass - the educational version of the overworked rogue SAS units in Afghanistan murdering peasants for sport.
Selection pressures. As schools become increasingly tough environments, gentle souls who refuse to adapt drop out of the teacher workforce, leaving behind only the brutalized.
I don’t think there can be much doubt that schools have become tougher over the last decade, and austerity is largely to blame. Class sizes have gone up and funding per pupil is down quite significantly. Exclusions are up as well, partly a reflection of schools getting tougher on discipline, but probably also reflective of schools increasingly struggling to cope. There are more children with severe mental health problems than there were, probably driven by higher survival rates of very premature babies, elevated rates of family breakdown, and whatever the heck is going on with teenage girls.
Skilled teachers can, with some assistance, manage one or two children with severe emotional problems, but add one or two more and a tipping point is crossed, as the most messed-up children constantly bump up against each other and can’t be kept apart.
There are a few other under-appreciated factors that make English schools especially nasty. One is the very low rate of textbook usage, which places an enormous burden of lesson planning on teachers. Student teachers and NQTs in particular generally find this unbearable, because they don’t have a stack of lessons from previous years to draw on, and mentors often refuse to share. This also punishes teachers working in tiny departments or very small schools, because they will have no one to share planning with.
Reading DfES documents from the early 2000s, it’s clear that New Labour explicitly planned for a much higher accountability burden in schools, but only in the context of radically increased funding. Under austerity, the funding dried up but standards could not be allowed to slip. Schools must remain an Eden. But as we know, Edens are very hard to maintain, and even for God, it didn’t work out too well. To this point schools have survived by exploiting the martyrdom complex you find amongst so many teachers. Zoomers, however, may be more mercenary and less interested in public service on terrible terms. Perhaps one day teacher unions will even rediscover the virtues of “work to rule”. The neoliberalisation of schools may be slowly heading for the endgame. What comes after will be for a new generation to determine.