31 Dec 2016

Why Britain Is Facing A Crisis In Recruiting Head Teachers - It’s Not Rocket Science

By Mike Buchanan: In today’s Times, on p.6, there’s an article taking up half the page, ‘Schools crisis as hundreds of heads quit’. The journalist is Nicola Woolcock, the paper’s Education Correspondent. Extracts:

Britain is facing a crisis in recruiting teachers, with thousands complaining of high pressure and insufficient pay and retire early…
Nowhere in the lengthy article does Ms Woolcock mention the obvious causes of the crisis:
1. The feminisation of the teaching profession. The proportion of teachers who are female in primary schools is over 90+, in secondary schools over 70%.
2. Gender-typical work ethic differences. We know from Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory (2000) that while four in seven British men are ‘work-centred’, only one in seven British women is. As the education profession has become ever more feminised, the number of teachers with the ambition to become head teachers has inevitably fallen.
3. The absurdly small difference between the salaries of head teachers and deputy heads, presumably because most deputy heads are women.
From the article:

For some teachers, the step up from deputy or assistant head is not worth the hassle. The salary rise is not significant in many cases.
Deputies at local authority schools earn a minimum of £38,600, rising to a maximum of £107,000 a year in London. [The equivalent figures for head teachers are £44,000 and £108,000.]
Source


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