Retention: The two-year ECF is just a longer hazing period

I had to write a 500-word essay when I applied to my SCITT, which I submitted at 5am in advance of a 9am deadline – entirely on account of my inability to effectively plan my time. I told my friend who was completing her PGCE at the time about this. Her response was brusque: ‘Welcome to teaching’. This was my first brush with a toxic culture that glorifies struggle, a culture that pervades the profession and harms staff and students alike.

I am fortunate. The school where I trained had a positive environment: supportive SLT, generally well-behaved students and strongly embedded routines. And yet, despite having no history of poor mental health, mine deteriorated to breaking point. I was always exhausted. For several weeks of that first autumn term, I came home and got into bed until I could eventually fall asleep, ruminating over every mistake I thought I’d made that day.

When I told some of my colleagues, their stories were all the same or worse. I thought I was the problem, but one teacher told me she used to vomit with anxiety every morning before registration. Another was frequently reduced to tears by a mentor who regularly told her she wasn’t good enough. Yet they both insisted things would get better – and they did, for me. Not so for many of the others in my cohort.

The longer, two-year ECF was intended to remedy this, but a protracted induction will not ameliorate the underlying stressors of the job. As Becky Allen pointed out in these pages earlier this month, however, it’s cheaper than the real solutions to poor pay, poorer conditions and lack of trust.

What remains as a driver for retention is a heady cocktail of saviour complex, emotional blackmail and an ego-boosting belief that surviving the hazing means you’re more competent or industrious than those who opt out along the way. These responses often weave together to present teaching as a vocation. Jesse Jackson once famously implored: ‘Dream of teachers who teach for life and not for a living.’ Few would say the same of a digital marketer or shopkeeper. Yet here we are, by way of the PGCE and the DBS update service fee, paying for the privilege of being a teacher.

These toxic beliefs provide comfort to those of us who feel like we’ve entered a loser’s game, but the ramifications are insidious. Low retention is only one of them. One friend informed me that SLT at her state school placed bets on which of their trainees would last the year. Presenteeism is rife, with arriving early and leaving late seen as laudable. Unions are often afraid of running on a workers’ rights platform, so appeal to students’ outcomes instead.

Teach First is a prime example of this culture in action: recruit graduates from top ranking universities into underperforming state schools to make a difference where it counts most. But what difference can an inexperienced teacher really make in a challenging environment? In your first year, you teach an 80 per cent timetable and can earn as little as £18,419. This is a band-aid on the haemorrhaging of the education sector and its sink-or-swim ethos. And with summer placements in the private sector, it encourages participants outright to perceive teaching as a stepping stone towards something ‘greater’.

To be fair, career change is nothing to be ashamed of, and teaching is a great base from which to pivot to many professions. But given the ritual early-career hazing and limited prospects, where are the material incentives for teachers to stay?

At a time when Thursday is the new Friday and many professionals fit their jobs around their lives, many teachers have little to no social life and no flexibility. Older teachers are retiring to realise that they have no social net. Many frequently have to evaluate, as one colleague puts it, ‘whether the juice is still worth the squeeze’.

The answer to the retention problem is clear. Instead of admonitions to squeeze harder, we need juicier oranges.