It’s feast or famine, there’s not a lot of balance in teaching. It’s not a structure that works with people, that works with teaching. Really there needs to be a complete restructuring. It’s been studied, it’s been identified, we know what really works.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest issues we have culturally in this country is a fear of change. The fear prevents us from moving forward and keeping up. It’s better for the children to have shorter terms and more regular breaks, it would be a lot less pressure on the teachers. Whenever teachers suffer stress, that stress gets passed down to the students.
There are a lot of teachers at my level of experience that have left who should probably still be working. The pressure has made the profession less desirable, people with skillset and passion are going ‘hang on, I can do a lot better elsewhere’.
There is no fix to this unless there’s a complete overhaul of the system.
If you look at what your product is in education, it is a child, and their learning is fundamentally the most important thing.
As told to Carol Spencer
