Perhaps no other job, with the possible exception of being a parent, has the kind of learning curve that teaching does. As many teachers put it, no matter how good the training gets, nothing quite prepares you for the moment when the classroom door closes, and you are in sole charge of the education and welfare of 30 children.

But, while plenty of people still have misgivings about teacher training and are calling for further improvements, almost all in teaching seem to agree that the 25,000 newly qualified teachers who are starting work at their schools this month will be better prepared for that moment than any previous generation.

Some argue that this is because this year, more than ever before, schools have been able to tailor the experience of trainees to what they will face in the real world. For the first time, the proportion of postgraduate NQTs training through school-centred routes has tipped past 51 per cent.

And yet that shift has been a gradual one and it has, thus far, not arrested shocking drop-out rates for NQTs. There’s a good chance that more than one in eight of this year’s new teachers will not last until the end of the academic year.

The same thing has happened every year for a decade: around 13 per cent of teachers have dropped out during their first 12 months in the profession, and the growing role of school-centred training has failed to make an impact on these figures.

This is a time when teacher recruitment is heading for a crisis: five years ago, only two subjects had unfilled training places at secondary level; today, 14 out of 17 subjects have shortages. That’s just one shocking recruitment statistic among many. Schools can hardly afford to be losing teachers. So why do NQTs decide to quit so soon into their career?

‘I was left drowning’

When Lawrence (not his real name) began training as a primary school teacher, he had every reason to think it would go well. He had won a place on a coveted Schools Direct salaried programme, beating tough competition, including one teaching assistant already working at the school.

And he was joining a federation with two outstanding schools and a headteacher who had won national plaudits for her leadership.

But his training year was a disaster, which he only scraped through. Schools were desperate for teachers, however, and he was quickly offered a job. Even so, his working life did not improve, and by Christmas of his NQT year, he quit in despair.

“The work-life balance was the thing that tipped me over the edge,” he says. “I would be the first person in the school every morning and usually the last to leave. And I still felt like I was drowning.

The work-life balance was the thing that tipped me over the edge

“I went to see the head to say, ‘This is my experience - I’m really struggling,’ and her response was, ‘Well, that’s the job: you have to choose between your career and your family.’ I handed my notice in because I thought, ‘I’m going to crack up if I carry on.’”

Now, he’s completed a successful NQT year as an ICT teacher at a secondary independent school, following several months as a supply teacher. His marriage and family life are intact. And he’s had time to look back on the experience to see where he and the schools that he worked at went wrong.

The things that stand out for him are the lack of advice on entering the profession, how unprepared he was for students’ special needs, the isolation of the job and the overwhelming demands of lesson planning.

The entrance points to the profession are indeed complicated. In Sir Andrew Carter’s review of initial teacher training last year, he defended the diverse provision as a strength of the system but said teachers needed better guidance when choosing a course: should you go for HE-based training, Schools Direct, school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) or Teach First?

“Confusing, contradictory and overwhelming” was the conclusion of the National College for Teaching and Leadership, in a report on the “customer journey” into teacher training.

It’s a point echoed by David Weston, chief executive of the Teacher Development Trust and chair of the Teachers’ Professional Development Expert Group. “I’m pretty involved in education and actually I would struggle to name all the different routes,” he says. “I would struggle to advise someone exactly on the best way in.”

The problem is not just that there are multiple routes, but also that too little is known about each of those routes for informed decisions to be made.

For example, although the Schools Direct salaried route Lawrence opted for had been launched by then education secretary Michael Gove as an option for career-changers - people who were “not part of the blob”, recalls Lawrence - the school regarded it as mainly for experienced teaching assistants (TAs).

That’s perhaps because Schools Direct programmes in primaries receive far less funding: £17,000, compared with £23,000 in other programmes or more than £38,000 for Teach First, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Less funding inevitably means less support. But how many teachers are aware of these differences when they choose their route? How many may have chosen differently - and found themselves on a course more suited to them - if they had known?

The right support

Lawrence felt a lack of support most keenly in working with a girl who had a severe learning disability.

“I just didn’t know what to do,” he says. “She would run off, she would scream and shout. I never got any written work out of her. I found that very difficult to cope with.”

Simon Knight, director of education at the National Education Trust and former deputy headteacher of Frank Wise School in Oxfordshire, an all-through special school, says the preparation of NQTs for working with special needs has been so variable that many schools - and, in particular, special schools - expect to start from scratch with new teachers.

“I think one of the real challenges that we face in teacher education is that there’s an awful lot of stuff to cover and not very much time to cover it in,” says Knight. “At Frank Wise, we recruited very much on a ‘values and attitudes’ basis. We were used to having to teach people the skills.”

Responding to similar criticisms in the Carter review, the new core framework for initial teacher training requires teachers to be able to adapt their lessons for those students who have autism, dyslexia, ADHD and sensory or speech impairments, among other disabilities.

Stephen Munday, executive principal of Comberton Village College and chair of the working group that produced the framework, says that training for teaching students with SEND stood out as the concern that demanded some of the most extensive recommendations.

“The level of what’s in there does clarify quite how important it is to cover that area significantly,” he says.

It’s not just SEND that causes concerns. For example, government behaviour tsar Tom Bennett chaired a working party looking into behaviour management training on teacher-training programmes and criticised its “glaring omission” from some programmes (read the TES report).

The training is not the only issue here: when new teachers are out of their depth, they should be able to call for help. But the mentoring of NQTs is perhaps the most personal and most variable aspect of teacher training. Get matched with someone sympathetic, and you could be inspired to new heights. But teaching careers have been wrecked by bad mentoring relationships.

“She’d just say, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.’ And it never was fine, it just got worse and worse,” says Lawrence of his mentor. The group of NQTs at his school were largely left to work together in a planning group. “Being a primary teacher is very lonely. We were pretty much left to our own devices: I felt like we were the blind leading the blind,” he adds.

John Cater, former director of the Teacher Training Agency and vice-chancellor of Edge Hill University, one of the largest HE providers, says that it’s crucial to provide support networks for new teachers, who are often isolated.

“[As a career-changer] you’re going from a situation in which you’re one of 20 people working together, sharing what works, occasionally - to be honest - popping the cork out of the bottle of wine,” he says. “And then you’re finding yourself as one person in a difficult school with perhaps not an especially supportive mentor, with a substantial timetable. You can understand why in those circumstances retention data isn’t as good as we’d like it to be.”

Teachers should take being a great mentor as seriously as they take being a great teacher, Weston suggests. At the moment, that only seems to happen rarely.

“My recollection is when I was a mentor to someone in beginning teaching, I was invited to come along to one training session. I never actually went and no one really followed up,” he says.

“Adult training is clearly as complicated as teaching children. We need to spend as much time thinking about that. If it takes a year before we’re ready to train and teach students, maybe we need to think about more training, more induction into the work of induction and training.”

The government has responded to this issue. It asked the Teaching Schools Council to oversee the development of non-statutory standards for mentoring in schools, standards that will be assessed by Ofsted. It’s a short document, but it has been received as a step in the right direction.

Relentless workload

Of course, as good as a mentor may be and as well-trained as new teachers can be, that won’t take away the more general issue of workload that affects every teacher in the profession.

What eventually broke Lawrence was the relentless grind of lesson planning.

“I needed more formal training. I needed a gentler introduction,” he says.

I needed more formal training. I needed a gentler introduction

But his Schools Direct programme didn’t provide that gentle introduction: given that he was a salaried member of staff, it’s no wonder that the school had high expectations from day one.

In both the school that he trained at and the one he began his NQT year in, Lawrence says he was expected to reinvent the wheel with his lesson planning. He had a scheme of work but no lesson plans or resources to match, so he couldn’t follow in the footsteps of the previous class teacher.

Paralysed by inexperience, it would take him three or four hours to plan every hour in the classroom.

“It was just constant terror of not knowing where to begin, not knowing what I’m doing,” he says.

Colin Harris, a former primary headteacher of more than 20 years’ experience in the top job and now an education consultant, recognises this condition in new teachers.

“A lot of teachers are coming in with the view that they’re almost burned out before they’re started, and that worries me,” he says. “A lot of schools don’t give them time. NQTs are not the finished product and I think too many schools think they are. That’s not really acceptable.”

He argues that many of these teachers perform well with paperwork and planning, even if it means they work 60 hours a week. But the emphasis on planning leaves little room for what he says is the teacher’s real skill: dealing with the unexpected, such as changing a lesson on the spot to respond to pupils’ needs.

“One of the things I love watching is a lesson that’s going wrong,” Harris says. “What you’re looking for in a new teacher then is: one, have they got the confidence to stop it? Two, have they got anything to carry it on with?”

For Cater, stories like Lawrence’s make him question whether schools are always in a position to properly induct new teachers. “If I’m being slightly controversial, the debate is always about whether NQTs are ready for schools, but I think there’s also a debate quite often about whether schools are ready for NQTs,” he says.

So how can we ensure that future generations of teachers are better prepared, and that more new teachers stay in the profession for longer?

A consensus seems to be emerging that England has had too much of a “throw them in at the deep end” strategy for NQTs, who then either sink or swim - and the move to school-centred training has only exacerbated this.

‘CPD is in a terrible state’

Polly Enevoldson, a Teach First teacher who successfully completed her NQT year, says new teachers need a special kind of resilience. “At the start, it’s massively hard not to take it personally. You have lessons where it’s just awful: children say things without thinking about it. They’re teenagers, trying to upset you. It’s all part of the learning experience.”

Teach First doesn’t quite throw its trainees into the classroom cold, though. Responding to feedback from trainees, the charity offers an increasing number of practice experiences that are as close to live as possible, such as small-class teaching in its six-week summer institute.

Reuben Moore, the charity’s director of leadership, also stresses that it is a two-year programme, with formal training beyond the NQT year. “There’s a limit to what can be done in one year,” he says. “CPD is in a terrible state, unless you’re in one of a very small number of academy chains.

“It’s clear that the school-based training isn’t getting to the depth required on things like child development, on stuff like SEND, on stuff like a research-informed approach. That’s where the universities are so valuable and vital.”

In Finland and Germany, trainee teachers spend around 650 days at university compared with a maximum of 60 in England, even on programmes that are nominally HE-based. Professor Tony Brown, of Manchester Metropolitan University, who has studied the shift in teacher training to school-based models, says: “England has gone massively out of line with Europe. It’s quite a staggering difference.”

His work showed that what was missing from English teacher training was the chance for trainees to explore subject-specific pedagogy, to understand how pupils approached their subject and figure out potential misconceptions - something that Sir Andrew Carter’s report also recommended.

It’s an absence of time to absorb new learning, reflect on it and improve your practice.

“Everyone knows that NQTs go in and get a hard time, don’t they? And it’s kind of accepted that it’s OK,” says John Stanier, assistant headteacher at Great Torrington School in Devon.

The idea that they are prepared as teachers after only one year does them a disservice, he adds. He has been struck by just how overconfident some NQTs have been when starting at his school, rating themselves as experts in teaching skills on an internal survey.

“It’s getting trainees to understand that how they are taught to teach now isn’t necessarily the best way, or will necessarily stand the test of time. They always need to be engaged in this debate and developing how they teach,” he says.

What might help is if White Paper proposals for a shake-up of qualified teacher status are followed through (see box, below). Schools would be responsible for signing teachers off as qualified when they’re ready, which may mean a longer preparation period.

“We think this means that they will enter teaching at a higher level,” says Roger Pope, the chairman of the National College for Teaching and Leadership, which has the responsibility of advising the government on strategies that can improve the workforce in education.

Whether the plan will come to fruition, given that we have a new education secretary and a government preoccupied with Brexit, remains to be seen.

Clearly, though, a key factor in NQTs being badly prepared for the realities of school - and a key factor in them dropping out of the profession - is the fact that the system makes them think that their training is over at that early stage. In fact, it’s just begun.

The Department for Education was asked to comment on the School Direct programme for this article, but did not respond to the request.

Joseph Lee is a freelance journalist specialising in education
@josephlee