The Looming Teaching Crisis
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According to new official Labour statistics, more than 31% of 20,600 newly qualified teachers have left the profession within five years. 17% of them quit within two years.
The statistics also showed that a quarter of teachers who qualified in 2011 have left since, with 28,000 of them citing harsh working conditions and low pay as the major reason.
It comes as the Chancellor Philip Hammond reportedly said in a cabinet meeting that public sector workers were “overpaid” and do not need a pay rise. The comments were still very raw considering that just weeks ago the government refused to lift the public sector pay cap that was introduced by David Cameron’s government in 2010.
The pay cap, which limits the pay rise for all public sector workers including teachers at 1% each year, has led to a decline in teachers’ income over the years by a whopping 15%, according to the National Union of Teachers (NUT).
All of these factors are contributing to what has been described as a ‘crisis’ in the profession with the number of newly-qualifying teachers in 2015-16 dropping by 1,000.