Nearly a third of teachers who qualified in 2016 left just five years later in 2021. Overworked with lesson planning, marking and admin, teachers are leaving the profession in their thousands.
As a former teacher, I understood these issues first-hand. The workload; the endless marking and administration, and that’s on top of teaching and lesson planning. Every single day, I thought about quitting.
What’s worse is that many teachers don’t have a voice. Unless teachers are in a managerial position, they often have very little say on what technology they use in class and what solutions are introduced to help with issues.
For instance, when I was a teacher, we would be told about and trained on a new piece of software or digital tool during an inset day. But, often, the decision to introduce the new technology had already been made, without consulting either the teachers or students meant to use it.
To make matters worse, getting to grips with these different tools required extra time and training – often in the evenings or at weekends. Just one inset day wouldn’t be enough to understand how to properly use the new technology and ensure it worked in class.