The fourth edition of Green Shoots’ annual teacher survey has found a sector facing challenges on multiple fronts. Below are the key headlines with the full report available to download here.
Teacher feedback on the macro-education landscape
Teachers assessing the national school landscape described a sector that is battling challenges on multiple fronts. Some of the most pressing issues raised by teachers include:
- an increasing need for expanded SEND provision
- recruitment and retention issues caused in part by a workload crisis
- declining parental engagement
- intense feeling of pressure from Ofsted.
Underscoring all of these issues is a deteriorating financial position caused by costs that have rapidly increased in recent years.
In this context, the Labour government have come into office and have inherited a number of problems that need solving. Many of the initiatives that the new government have implemented thus far are in their early stages and need more time to evaluate whether they are likely to effectively address these issues. However, it does seem that the period of grace that a new government is afforded when taking office is starting to wear thin, and it is important that some of these initiatives are shown to bear fruit in the near future.
Teacher feedback on the situation at the school-level
Despite the issues affecting the national landscape, teachers are more positive when reflecting on the situation within their own schools.
Teachers tend to describe a working environment that has a supportive culture (75% agree vs 14% who disagree), that has effective leadership with a clear strategic plan that is heading in the right direction (67% agreed vs 18% who disagreed), and which has an effective CPD programme (60% agreed vs 23% who disagreed).
However, many of the problems witnessed at the national level are of course apparent when you look at individual schools. Notably, only 21% of teachers agree that they have enough funding to enable them to provide high quality teaching and learning, and 61% of teachers say that the financial health of their schools has deteriorated over the past year. Projecting forwards, teachers foresee significantly increasing outgoing on staffing salaries and on school premises and facilities. In response to rising core costs, many schools intend to cut back spending on learning resources and on CPD.
Teacher feedback on their personal experience of working in teaching
When considering how things are going from a personal perspective, many teachers (75%) describe deriving satisfaction from their work. However, this is of course only part of the story, with teachers qualifying this data by pointing out challenging working environments, with high levels of workload, challenging behaviour from students and parents, and high expectations to deliver. Notably only a small minority say that they have enough time in the working week to achieve everything that they want to (only 17% agreed that this was possible). As a result, while teachers often report deriving satisfaction from parts of their job (which is typically the teaching aspect), they often do not enjoy many other aspects of the job.
Reflecting on other aspects of their personal experience, most report feeling supported by their school’s SLT and other colleagues (69% agreed that this was the case vs 18% who disagreed) and that they believe they can achieve their career goals (63% agreed vs 19% who disagreed).
Feedback on Ofsted and the Big Listen Exercise
Ofsted has been much in the news over the past months, with the results of the Big Listen exercise published in September clarifying changes to how Ofsted inspections would be carried out moving forwards.
Teachers’ attitudes towards Ofsted continue to be unfavourable, and only 34% of teachers agree that Ofsted fulfils a useful function.
That being said, teachers tend to agree that the Ofsted rating that their school received upon their last inspection was fair (69% of teachers agreed that was the case), and around a quarter of teachers (27%) said that a previous Ofsted inspection has helped to bring about positive change in their school.
When considering the changes coming out of the Big Listen exercise, teachers were cautiously optimistic (44% said that they were either very positive or somewhat positive about the proposed changes to Ofsted), although many were sitting on the fence (44% reported being undecided).
Of the initiatives announced, teachers were most positive with regards to taking into account area insights (67% rated this initiative as either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’) and were least positive about the prospect of single headline grades being replaced by report cards (48% rated this initiative as either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’).
Ofsted are going through another round of consultation with teachers on the way that inspections are conducted, and it remains to be seen exactly what the outcomes of that exercise will be.
Teachers’ attitudes towards the use of AI in education
Over the past year, AI has been increasingly embraced by teachers. More than two-thirds of teachers reported that they have used AI at least once to support their teaching (up from 40% last year) and teachers are more positive about the potential for AI to have a positive impact on teaching and learning (28% of teachers described themselves as being enthusiastic about what AI can offer to education and have tried to embrace it).
When asked which AI-based tools they have used, teachers cited 62 different platforms, a significant increase from the 35 tools cited in last year’s survey (the complete list of AI-based tools being used by teachers can be seen in the full report). TeachMate was the most widely used education specific tool and was also the tool which was rated highest in terms of its effectiveness for teaching and learning purposes.
Despite growing use of AI for teaching and learning purposes, several barriers exist, the most common of which are:
- not having the time to work out how AI tools can be used to support teaching
- needing training in how to most effectively use AI
- feeling overwhelmed by the number of AI tools available
These are all issues that Edtech providers should be able to help teachers with, ensuring that teachers are able to make the most effective use of their tools.
When asked about trustworthy and influential voices that teachers would turn to on the topic of using AI for teaching and learning purposes, a number of names were suggested, but far and wide the most common name suggested was Mr P ICT. Other leading voices mentioned by respondents included a mix of subject specialists, education researchers, and AI specialists. The complete list of expert voices can be seen in the full report.
Teachers’ use of Oak National Academy
At present, a relatively small proportion of teachers surveyed are using Oak on a regular basis, with 7% of teachers using the platform at least weekly. However, this still represents a large number of teachers and has notably increased over the past year (up from 3% last year).
Also of note is that teachers are seemingly using Oak for a wider range of tasks than they have done in previous years. Teachers who are using Oak say that they are most likely to use the bank of ready-made resources to use in-class (51% of people who have ever used Oak have used it for this reason), for lesson cover (33%), and for lesson planning (32%). Notably there has been an increase in the percentage of teachers saying that they use it for lesson planning (up from 18% last year), while there has also been a smaller increase in the percentage of teachers saying that they use Oak for readymade resources to use in-lesson (up from 44% last year).
Get in touch for more information
For more information about the full report, please contact Research Director, Mike Kelly (mike.kelly@greenshootsmi.com).
Green Shoots Market Intelligence 