Conference abstract

For all its rewards, teaching can be a challenging profession. High expectations are applied to individual teachers, irrespective of the nature of the students. Surveys by teaching unions (Lough, 2020; Will, 2019); data from the Department of Education; and peer-reviewed journals demonstrate that there is a high turn-over of newly train teachers. These sources are consistent in reporting that about two out of every five teachers leave the profession within 5 years of starting their training, contrasting sharply with doctors, who can be expected to have 25-year careers (Goldacre and Lambert, 2013), though it is higher among nurses (Senek et al., 2020). The impact of Covid-19 has exacerbated the challenges that teachers face (Kim and Asbury, 2020).

The specific situation for teachers of sociology was not researched in the UK until recently. Using a large survey and a focus group, Cant et al. (2020) showed that they experience additional burdens compared to teachers of subjects that are part of the National Curriculum up to Year 11 (the end of the GCSE year). Sociology teachers typically feel isolated. Firstly, very few of them are able to specialise in their subject – typically they are expected to fit sociology in with other subjects and departmental subject meetings for those other subjects invariably take priority even when there are other sociology teachers in the school. This leads to the second limitation. Sociology teachers either teach the subject alone or with only one other teacher in the school, which is not the case for subjects in the National Curriculum where a team of subject specialists often support each other. From this flowed the third factor leading to isolation because they rarely or never got the chance to network with other teachers of the subject or even got support from the school for subject-specific resources or training. This last issue is particularly important because about half the teachers surveyed did not have sociology as part of their academic or training background.

This presentation will outline the project and its intention to offset the problems described above. A three-pronged approach has been devised. The first, and simplest phase has been initiated in the form of reaching out to interested parties via Twitter. This platform has been chosen for its ubiquity and ease of use, though some account needs to be taken of its shortcomings. The second prong is to facilitate the sharing of resources. This is particularly important because of the acute issues affecting sociology teachers outlined above, and because the unanticipated workload – especially for new teachers – is a major reason for leaving the profession (Perryman and Calvert, 2020). Again, issues around the strengths and limitations of sharing resources will be examined in the presentation. The third prong relates to tracking student progress in a way that relieves some of the burdens this aspect of teaching creates (Richardson et al., 2018). This presentation will be of particular interest to anyone concerned with teacher retention and training, and developing online networks to support teachers.

Word count: 496

References

Cant, S., Savage, M. and Chatterjee, A. (2020) ‘Popular but Peripheral: The Ambivalent Status of Sociology Education in Schools in England’, Sociology, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 37–52 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/0038038519856815.

Goldacre, M. J. and Lambert, T. W. (2013) ‘Participation in Medicine by Graduates of Medical Schools in the United Kingdom up to 25 Years Post Graduation: National Cohort Surveys’, Academic Medicine, vol. 88, no. 5, pp. 699–709 [Online]. DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e31828b364f.

Kim, L. E. and Asbury, K. (2020) ‘“Like a rug had been pulled from under you”: The impact of COVID-19 on teachers in England during the first six weeks of the UK lockdown’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 90, no. 4, pp. 1062–1083 [Online]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12381.

Lough, C. (2020) ‘Third of teachers leaving the profession within 5 years’, Tes, London, 25th June [Online]. Available at https://www.tes.com/news/recruitment-third-teachers-leaving-profession-within-5-years (Accessed 8 November 2020).

Perryman, J. and Calvert, G. (2020) ‘What motivates people to teach, and why do they leave? Accountability, performativity and teacher retention’, British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 3–23 [Online]. DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1589417.

Richardson, R., Goodman, P., Flight, S. and Richards, G. (2018) ‘Reducing teacher workload - Research report’, Flying High Partnership [Online]. Available at https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/31209/1/Flying_High_-_Reducing_teacher_workload.pdf (Accessed 6 January 2021).

Senek, M., Robertson, S., Ryan, T., King, R., Wood, E., Taylor, B. and Tod, A. (2020) ‘Determinants of nurse job dissatisfaction - findings from a cross-sectional survey analysis in the UK’, BMC Nursing, vol. 19, no. 1, p. 88 [Online]. DOI: 10.1186/s12912-020-00481-3.

Will, H. (2019) ‘Teachers quit because they find workload “worse than expected”’, Tes, 2nd April [Online]. Available at https://www.tes.com/news/teachers-quit-because-they-find-workload-worse-expected (Accessed 8 November 2020).

This is my video poster - I had the good intention of adding a spoken word track for accessibility reasons, but ran out of time before the TMA02 deadline. Such is life.