Red tape and pushy parents the top reason teachers are quitting

An anonymous primary school teacher has revealed exactly why her colleagues are quitting in droves … and parents are up the top of her list of complaints.

I love teaching, but sadly it only takes up 20 per cent of my time. The rest is spent on dealing with red tape and bureaucracy.

I have been a teacher for five years, I loved it at the start, but the workload is crippling.

In the staffroom, everyone is exhausted all the time. When we have staff meetings, there is always someone talking about quitting.

While school starts on Monday morning, by Sunday afternoon I am riddled with worry and Mondayitis. Normally I am preparing activities for the children, doing paperwork I didn’t have a chance to do the week before — or writing reports.

The “busy work” is immense — a large amount of it is programming, whereby we must plan every lesson, then describe how it went, and how we modified it for every student and annotate our lesson plan.

Teachers are drowning in red tape and paperwork.

In the morning, I am at work by 7.30am just to get everything done.

I usually have about eight emails already from parents. It could be “my child lost their homework book” to “can you make sure they drink water today”. Most of them are errands they want me to do. Or they can be abrupt and say, “I feel they’re not getting enough maths homework” or “I feel my child is falling behind”.

Then you have to organise the classroom for the day’s activities and upload lessons to Google classroom.

Actually teaching pupils is the best part of the job … but nowhere near enough time is devoted to it. Picture: iStock

The kids are the best part of the day, that’s what I signed up for. But in class I have to do data entry and make notes about each child’s reading ability. The tricky part about that is they have an attention span of about three minutes. I need to actually be engaged with the children, rather than just doing bureaucratic work.

You don’t get a moment to yourself. In public schools, teachers get two hours of preparation time per week. In reality, I spend that in a meeting with my co-ordinator or dealing with calls to parents.

Then we have to spend an hour a week on professional development.

One of the big things is incident reports. If someone has had an argument, or they’ve fallen over in the playground, you have to write an incident report. It has to be 1000 words written in “objective” language.

I leave work by 5.30pm and go home, sometimes you have to spend hours marking their work.

Heading into lockdown, we were expected to transfer all of the learning from the classroom into online platforms, which was insanely stressful.

That expectation is still there for us, my kids are dropping like flies with Covid, and the parents expect me to give them work at home they can do online.

Teachers I know have burnt out and have chronic fatigue from the workload.

There are loads and loads of teachers leaving now.

Everyone is fed up.