Is teaching suffering an identity crisis?

Last week, Teach First released a report offering a ‘roadmap’ to encourage Gen Z into teaching.

Its recommendations were a smorgasbord of tidbits designed to entice the youth: better pay, secondment schemes, career break schemes, flexible working, professional development and so on.

While there is no doubt we need to think about the best ways to encourage a new generation of young people into teaching, these ideas seemed to inadvertently reveal a bigger, conceptual issue at the heart of education: we don’t seem sure of what it means to be a teacher nowadays.

According to the report, 73 per cent said teaching was a job that ‘had purpose’, even higher than doctors or nurses. But beyond the report’s references to influencing young people, or ‘doing something good for the world or society’, do we know what that purpose is?

The role of the teacher: an evolution

For the wealthy, teachers are almost seen as part of ‘the domestic help’, like cooks or cleaners, that provide a need that can be bought for a price - and the more you have, the better the service you can (they believe) buy.

Historically, and tied closely to the church, it meant teachers held high-status positions in the community akin to doctors or clerics: inculcators of virtue, sources of moral authority.

This vision has had something of a renaissance recently, the most extreme example being self-titled ‘Britain’s strictest head’ Katharine Birbalsingh, who has generated plenty of publicity with this approach.

Conversely, teachers are simultaneously presented as either counterculture activists, champions of resistance against oppression, or failing to uphold moral norms and promoting dangerous ‘left-wing’ ideologies.

• Don’t fixate on Gen Z, look after millennial mother-teachers
• How a student loan repayments policy could retain 2,100 teachers
• The scale of the teacher retention crisis revealed

‘Teaching viewed as poorly paid martyrdom’

Then, there is the social mobility angle - teachers as those who can lift people out of poverty. This is a view very much found in government thinking, and Teach First itself has also worked to enlist graduates to teach in disadvantaged areas.

It’s not clear if such recruitment organisations have had a positive impact on the identity of teaching though, given that the retention rate for Teach Firsters isn’t great and they’re more likely to be promoted out of the classroom.

It also means teaching often appears like missionary work or gap-year charity work, than a life-long career. Indeed, the report last week noted there’s a danger teaching is viewed as ‘poorly paid martyrdom’ - something many Gen Z-ers can’t see themselves doing long term.

Perhaps worst of all though, is that our education system does not seem to place any value in the experience and wisdom in teaching. Instead, teachers are at the mercy of reductionist tendencies that degrade their status - most clearly seen in our school accountability systems.

‘A mere transmitter of information’

Targets often reduce the job of a classroom teacher to dragging students through the hoops dictated by exam boards, or even worse engaging in bizarre rituals in the hope of ticking some Ofsted box.

By such systems, a teacher of years, full of knowledge and experience of adapting to different pupils’ needs can, through an arbitrary grade boundary or poorly written exam question, see their entire worth called into question.

What’s more, this has all happened at a time when the dominance of ‘information processing’ paradigms in educational thinking has increasingly reduced the teacher to a mere transmitter of information that encourages evermore atomisation of curricula and mechanisation of teaching.

The reductionism of target-setting and cognitive science are addictive for policy-makers, simultaneously promising the silver bullets of progress and efficiency savings. But for teachers themselves, it all makes for a confusing and stressful job.

‘Determined by what’s not happening elsewhere’

The fact is that teacher identity is often de facto determined by what’s not happening elsewhere.

For example, with cutbacks across numerous public services, teachers are also now having to act as makeshift social workers, counsellors, educational psychologists, police officers, doctors and so on.

It’s no wonder so many leave - or are put off the job entirely.

The stress of the job comes up in the report a few times, and it recommends tackling workload to reduce this, but so far ideas to tackle workload only seem to undermine further what we consider teachers to be.

‘Let teachers be teachers’

After all, how often do teachers have to suffer the ignominy of being told (often by people who have left the profession) that they’d be happier were they to forsake their agency and adopt centrally-mandated plans or help from AI?

As teachers are reduced from Mr Chips to microchips, they are saved only from the opportunity to feel pride in their work.

If the government wants a strategy for encouraging recruitment, here’s my twopence: let teachers be teachers.

Bernard Andrews is a philosophy teacher