Hello Tappsters!
This week – great news – pretty much ALL of you (92%) are on your Easter holidays! 🐣🎊.
New month – new prize draw. Be sure to check to see if you are the proud owner of the winning ticket from March. The winning ticket was brown-fish-462 and you can see if you have that code in the ‘Prize Draw’ section of your app (accessible on the homepage).
This month, we’re giving one teacher a £500 restaurant voucher to take his or her teacher friends out for dinner.
To be in with a chance of winning, answer Teacher Tapp questions for three days in a row to earn one ticket in the draw. That means you would earn at least 10 tickets over the whole month if you tap every day!
Check your app to see how many tickets 🎫 you’ve already accumulated – and be sure to keep tapping every day to get as many as you can before the end of March.
Why teachers leave
It’s a feeling we all know well, those days when you think ‘stuff this – I’m doing something else’ . Perhaps you get as far as an ‘out loud’ rant. Maybe you go as far as updating your LinkedIn profile and browsing recruitment websites. 😔
However, what we wanted to know is…what happened BEFORE that feeling kicked in?
Workload accounted for almost a third of the reasons why you consider leaving, whereas pay was the main driver for just 6% of you.
It’s pleasing to see 13% have never thought about leaving 🙌 – and only 3% attributed their desire to leave to school culture.
But we’ve also been asking questions about violent behaviour recently, prompted by our investigation with the BBC.
Those working in schools where they witnessed three or more fights in the past week that needed intervention said workload was less of an issue, and pupil behaviour was the most significant factor in their wanting to leave.
How significant? Well – 22% of you who had to intervene in three or more fights gave behaviour as a reason compared to 10% in schools with no fights.
Also noteworthy: teachers who saw no fights were the most likely to say they didn’t consider leaving teaching.
Buffer zones for protests
Last week a report on threats to social cohesion was published by Dame Sara Khan, the government’s independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience.
In the report she recommended that schools have a ‘buffer zone’ of 150 metres to prevent protests taking place outside 🪧.
We asked – would buffer zones be something you would support?
58% of you told us yes, and within that 46% said yes BUT wanted an exception made for teaching unions.
Just under a quarter said no, and 19% of you who were still undecided – suggesting perhaps more information needs to be released before you come to a decision?
Let us know where you stand on the issue and get in touch over socials or through the app.
The rise of cheating
A question new to Teacher Tapp last year was put to you again this week: have your pupils been using AI to cheat in their school work? 🤥
Overall, the numbers in secondary are much higher than last year.
Back in the midst of 2023, only 6% of secondary teachers suspected AI use on multiple occasions – this year it’s more than tripled to 20%.
And a further 15% suspected its use as a one-off, up from 9% last year.
Which means the percentage not experiencing this at all has fallen from 85% to 65%…
Let us know what you think on socials or through the app💬
Work anxiety
Anxiety about work is always going to be higher at certain points in the year, and at different times in your career.
To get a sense of that changing scale, we’ve been asking about your levels of workplace anxiety at regular intervals since 2019.
The good news is that levels of anxiety were down last week 🥳 – but with many of you either on holiday or about to start that may explain the lower reported levels of anxiety.
But how does that fit into the big picture? The graph below starts in October 2019 (by pure coincidence that’s when we started, we didn’t foresee the pandemic!) By March 2020 things got very hairy … But here’s the pattern since…
Of particular note is that meembers of the SLT, middle leaders and classroom teachers have converged over time, but headteachers remain distinctly higher.
Top events
This week’s top event is…
Thinking Deeply about Primary Education and their ‘Getting Routines Right’ on-demand event.
You can find this event and lots of others in the events tab on the Teacher Tapp app – be sure to check it out!
Ups and Downs
On the rise 📈
Students on the interview panel: More of you have schools where student panels form part of the interviews. This saw a dip two years ago from 28% in 2018 to 18% in 2022, and it’s now back up to 25%. Perhaps a covid bounce back?
Heading down 📉
Membership of subject associations: In just two years those of you in secondary schools telling us you belong to a subject association has dropped from 32% to 25%. Possibly the impact of the cost of living crisis, or maybe something else?
Daily Reads
Our most read daily read this week was the blog: Beware the dip by @misstbegum
If you would like to read the rest you can find them here 👇
