I'm a maths teacher in a secondary school. I love teaching as an actual thing to do, but teaching as a job has become beyond a joke. I've only worked in one school for a couple of years but from talking to other people I trained with and reading the Times Education website, it's absolutely shocking the workload teachers have to put up with.
You teach 22 hours a week which sounds like quite a light amount of actual "work" compared to a 9-5 job with extra hours, but if you think how long it takes you to prepare a 5 minute presentation at work, imagine preparing 22 full hour presentations a week, delivering them to kids who can't be arsed remembering to bring a pen or pencil into school even though they surprisingly managed to remember their mobile phones, and then taking home 20-30 pieces of work home to mark from each lesson (100+ pieces a day).
It's a joke and the staff cuts going on in the majority of schools due to a lack of funding means that people are constantly being asked to take more on with less time to do it. That's not to mention the amount of scrutiny and the constant arse covering from people in senior positions (which they have to do to be fair) having to raise with you why less than 70% of your special needs girls in Year 9 have made less than two sub-levels of progress since September.
I'm moving back from England to the Isle of Man soon though, hopefully with a new school to go into from September, so hoping it'll be a bit different from teaching in the UK without Ofsted breathing down everyone's necks.
