Bye Bye Baby-boomers Hello N.Q.T’s
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12 / 02 / 2009 | Author: dnorris
Bye Bye Baby-boomers Hello NQT’s
This year an estimated 10,000 teachers are due to retire in the United Kingdom. These are the so called baby boomers. They will drop out of the teaching pool but the immediate effect will be vacancies at middle and senior management level. The trickle down effect will only be seen later at classroom level.
Paradoxically a number of Local Authorities have jumped the gun. Time was when Easter marked the beginning of recruitment drives for the start of the academic year in September. From then on The Times Educational Supplement carried pages and pages of advertising, all for specific schools and specific posts.
Nowadays the calendar has been fast forwarded to February, only this time the target cohort is Newly Qualified Teachers, and they expect to finish their training in June.
Quickest off the blocks have been some Local Authorities in the London area. Boroughs like Hackney, Greenwich, Hillingdon, Barnet, Merton, Newham, Sutton, Croydon, Harringay, Brent, Lambeth and Newham have all been advertising vacancies.
There have been others of course. Doncaster and Peterborough and Dundee have al placed adverts but scrutiny soon shows that there is no level playing field in terms of opportunities.
London has traditionally been the heaviest recruiter of new teachers, for all sorts of reasons. One of those was the high turn over of staff. Another has been the expense of living in the capitol despite teachers getting a London weighting added to their salaries. Indeed the high cost of housing is the thing that affects new teachers the most because by definition they start out on the lowest rung of the salary scales just when they need to have the largest outlay of money.
London and the South East of England recruited almost 3,500 N.Q.T’s each in 2007/8 (the last year that records were published).
Manchester, Liverpool and the North West were the next highest in terms of recruitment. They took on 2,500 N.Q.T’s. with Birmingham and the West Midlands not far behind.
The trend would suggest that it is the industrial conurbations which dominate recruitment, but the North East of England which includes the Newcastle conurbation has by far the lowest level of recruitment and has had over the years 2005 – 2008. Recruitment was usually around 750 which contrasts strongly with places like the East Midlands which took 1500, the South West which includes rural Devon and Cornwall took 1700 and Yorkshire and Humberside took 1800.
This year the recruitment drives have taken on a more corporate style. Candidates have been invited to Recruitment Pool Days where they can meet head-teachers and senior teachers on an informal basis. They can visit specific schools where vacancies are known to occur, chat with the Human Resources teams, collect information at the Childcare information desk and most importantly discuss housing options. Some enterprising boroughs have even put together packages of deals from health care, fitness club membership, travel concessions and shopping discount options all in a bid to attract the newly qualified potential new recruits.
Its all head turning stuff for those about to embark on a teaching career, and it must make a welcome change after being observed, assessed, internally verified, externally verified and mentored in their training days.
All they need to remember is that if it seems too good to be true, why don’t they do the same in Newcastle? But then teaching in a capitol city really is different to teaching anywhere else.
