Congratulations, ECTs! For those of you who are ECT1, you are nearly halfway through. ECT2s, this is the beginning of your goodbye to the ECF, and soon you can call yourself a fully-fledged teacher!
We’ve been tracking your progress – and here are our some of the most interesting results…
1. ECTs are more optimistic about the upcoming term
The May half-term holiday is usually a popular one with teachers as the weather is a little warmer, and with the Bank Holiday, it gives an extra day to see non-teaching friends.
ECTs were more likely than non-ECT classroom teachers to spend the half term doing their hobbies (59% vs 53%) AND more likely to catch up on their sleep (74% vs 71%).
Perhaps that explains why ECTs are going into term 6 feeling upbeat! Compared to non-ECT classroom teachers, ECTs feel more optimistic about the last half term of the year (67% vs 53%).
2. Behaviour continues to challenge
In our last blog, we shared the happy news that the behaviour gap between ECTs and non-ECT classroom teachers had started to close.
This term, we don’t have such good news…disrupted lessons have seen a little uptick, and the gap has widened again to 5 percentage points, from 4 percentage points in April.
Why might this have happened? There are lots of reasons. First off, it’s important to note that behaviour in the Summer term IS really tough, and more experienced classroom teachers could be better prepared to deal with the challenges. Another reason could be due to the natural reaction when behaviour improves: you start to relax. Routines might have dropped. And then poor behaviour follows.
However, I had a sneaky feeling there might be more to this data, so we dug a little deeper…
Disruptions for primary ECTs and non-ECT classroom teachers were much more closely aligned than for secondary teachers: 49% vs 47% in primary and 38% vs 50% in secondary.
In April, the gap in secondary was HALF the size. So what might explain the change?
One explanation could be that ECTs might have more KS3 classes on their timetable, meaning that non-ECT classroom teachers have lighter teaching loads at the moment, and therefore behaviour management is easier when you’re not teaching back-to-back lessons.
Another reason could be that in secondary schools, behaviour changes when older students leave. Without year elevens around to ‘squash’ the younger years, they begin to exhibit more challenging behaviour.
Do you have a different theory? Share your ideas england@teachertapp.co.uk and we will include them in the next blog!
One thing that clearly requires no theorising: behaviour the 10 percentage point difference between ECTs and non-ECT classroom teachers is likely to be due to the behaviour gap. 67% of ECTs reported feeling unhappy due to student behaviour, compared to 57% of non-ECT classroom teachers.
4. Help is at hand
Asking for help can be pretty scary for an ECT – but the good news is that the majority feel that if they did ask for support from their line manager, they would get it. What’s more, when you compare ECTs with non-ECT classroom teachers, ECTs are even more likely to say they think their line manager would “do everything possible” or “help substantially” (56% vs 50%).
5. Cheating with AI
Here at Teacher Tapp we like to ask all sorts of questions – even awkward ones!
Last month, we asked Tappers to imagine themselves as students and posed the hypothetical question: if you were assigned an essay for homework and told NOT to use AI, would you use it anyway?
22% of teachers admit that yes, they probably would. But how does that figure change for ECTs? Not massively! 25% of ECTs would be tempted to take an LLM shortcut, compared to 22% of non-ECTs.
Onto the final half term…
And now onto the final half term! We have lots of ECT questions to finish off the year, so keep an eye out for them in your app PLUS a special blog where we do a Tapp round-up of the whole year. If you have any contributions you would like to share, please do send them in! 📧 England@teachertapp.co.uk
Have you got ECTs at your school who you think would find these findings interesting? Maybe they would like to take part in our investigation into the ECT experience! Use your app to send a referral, and get them Tapping!
