Our first Golden Ticket prize has been claimed! If it wasn’t you this time, don’t worry! There’s still two more chances to win – and the prize pot has been doubled for December, and is now £1,500. All existing tickets you’ve already won automatically go into the draw!
This is your weekly reminder that you’ll only be entered in the draw if you have a school name in England entered on your app details. Take the time now to check your school name is correct because we are using this to validate that you are indeed a teacher in England!
Now, onto results…
Budgets and Pay
In November’s Budget, schools received a somewhat unexpected announcement – a 4% rise in their school’s budget for each of the next two years. It was a surprise, for sure, and responses were mixed! While around half of you thought that it was good enough given the circumstances, the same percentage were either disappointed or angry.
That said, many senior leaders have shared some slight relief. When asked how their budget would be affected by the news, many welcomed the greater ability to fund the (previously unfunded) teacher pay rises. However, they still warned of the difficulties that lay ahead in spite of the additional funding, namely paying energy bills and some were still considering redundancies.
In other pay-related news, we asked what people expected from their job. Thanks to years of wage stagnation and real-terms cuts since 2010, 39% of teachers now say they expect high wages from the job – up from 30% when we asked in 2021. This was evenly spread across all seniorities.
That said, 39% is still less than half of those in the profession – many of you just want to be doing meaningful and interesting work!
Talking Research
Now, we know you Tappers are a research-informed bunch, but it seems that over the past year you’ve been talking with you colleagues more and more about research! When we first asked in 2020, 60% of you said that you’d have a conversation with a colleague about retrieval practice and now, in 2022 this is 75%. All of the other options also saw an increase, Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction was also a big mover, going from 39% to 55%.
Primary teachers have had fewer conversations with colleagues about these concepts, with 65% talking about retrieval practice compared to 84% of secondary teachers.
- Interleaving is discussed most among maths teachers, 71% of whom say they have discussed it with a colleague.
- Spaced practice is also popular in the secondary phase and science teachers discuss it the most – 63% of them said they’ve talked about it with a colleague.
‘Progression maps’ are a concept one teacher wanted us to find out more about. They appear to have more use in primary schools than secondary – with 65% of primary teachers regularly using them compared to 34% of secondary teachers. Among secondary teachers, Maths and Science teachers are the least likely to have heard of the concept, though they are used slightly more by English, Humanities and Arts teachers.
Behaviour
You may have noticed one of the regular questions we ask on Teacher Tapp relates to whether behaviour in lessons disrupts your lessons. Over time, results help to paint an interesting picture about how behaviour patterns have changed. In the 2019/20 academic year, around 40% of you were consistently saying that your lessons were being disrupted.
The pandemic appeared to ‘reset’ this disruption, with as few as 26% of you saying poor behaviour disrupted lessons when schools fully restarted in September 2020. However, as restrictions have eased further and time has passed, behaviour-related disruption has slowly, but steadily, risen.As restrictions eased and time passed, behaviour-related has been slowly, but steadily, rising since.
Many teachers also feel as if they don’t always get help to manage behaviour from leaders when they need it. Just 19% of teachers say they get help all of the time – and as we’ve reported on before, it’s the least experienced teachers who feel they don’t get help enough of the time, just 13% say they get enough help.
Many teachers – classroom leaders in particular – aren’t too complimentary about their school’s behaviour policy. We’ve seen differences between the perceptions of headteachers and classroom teachers in the past, but these are some of the biggest. Just 20% of classroom teachers think that their school’s behaviour policy is effective – 38 percentage points fewer than headteachers, and five percentage points less than the same time last year. Furthermore:
- Just 35% of classroom teachers think the behaviour policy is clear, compared to 59% of headteachers
- 44% think the policy is reasonable for staff, against 68% of heads
Finally… we know you love the daily read, so here are the ones from last week
The most-clicked-upon tip was about Reading to dogs in schools – what’s the evidence?
The remaining tips were:
