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What Teachers Tapped This Week #1 - 18th September 2017

17 September 2017

Thank you beta-testers!

Over the past week hundreds of you have answered questions and started the Teacher Tapp journey into making schools smarter.

Here are some things we have learned so far…

1. You don’t worry less about teaching as you get older

We asked a question about losing sleep over worry and found that around half of people said they lost sleep some or most of the time due to worry.

But was this worse for new teachers? We used information gleaned on another question about length of service to check to find out.

Turns out, things don’t vary much by experience…

People with over 20 years’ service worried more severely, with more than 20% saying they lost sleep over worry “most or all of the time”. This could be because those people are school leaders. We’ll dig into it more.

Either way, it’s a concern so many people are missing out on sleep, a critical factor in psychological functioning.

2. Did your parents go to university? (Looks like it depends)

66% of Teacher Tappsters did not have a parent who went to university. At first, we were a little surprised. There’s a prevailing view that many teachers are raised by middle class parents.

However, we wondered if there was an age effect given the expansion of higher education over the decades?

Our analysis duly revealed a substantial difference in parents’ education depending on whether a teacher was above or below 35. Does this matter? We’re not sure. It’s one for us to look at further in future. For now, it’s a quirky finding that might point us towards how the backgrounds of teachers is changing.

3. We caught some bugs! ???

Our development partners at Imactivate have been working away on an app update to fix the bug that means the questions sometimes fail to load when the app is already open and loaded.

The way apps sleep/deactivate in the background of your phone is more complicated than we first realised. While we are waiting for this update, a ‘hard close’ of the app will always sort the problem.

We also found a bug in our calculation of multi-response questions. Read more on that here.

4. How teachers feel about their pay is surprising!

The government are facing calls to increase teacher salaries beyond the 1% public sector pay cap. Given this, it was a surprise that more than half of Tappsters said they were moderately or very satisfied with their current level of pay.

Users on social media rightly tweeted saying this satisfaction level might vary depending on job role, subject, etc.

We looked into this, and here’s what we’ve found:

Salary satisfaction increases with experience (then appears to reduce again)

 

Maths teachers are most satisfied with their pay, MFL teachers are least satisfied

This is particularly interesting as maths teachers are often said to be the hardest to employ because they are able to earn so well in other sectors. Yet, maths teachers appear to be the most satisfied with their pay.

One reason for this may be because maths teachers are quietly paid more than other subjects. This is another area for us to explore further.

We also know this is a small sample of 502 teachers. Education ministers should NOT be using this to jump with joy! But it shows dissatisfaction with pay may not be evenly spread, nor wide-spread.

5. Time is what teachers really yearn after

Almost 40% of teachers said they would like to decrease their hours, with those who have served for more than 20 years feeling this most keenly.

However, see the green part of the 3 or 4 years line? Those are teachers who would like to increase their hours. It is only small, around 8%, but it is an interesting anomaly. Do these teachers feel ready for promotion? Is there a dip around the 3/4 year mark where people start to feel under-challenged?

6. You love getting a tip every day

Seriously. Tappsters seem to ? the tips. It’s one of the main things users are tweeting and emailing about.

Many of you have asked if we will list all the tips we post each week so you can catch up.

So, here they are!

7. Finally, this week we learnt you like Teacher Tapp! ?

Trying a new experiment like this is pretty risky, but we’ve been kept going through the teething problems by all the lovely things you’ve been saying about us. Things like this:

This is such a great idea! Got all excited when today’s questions came through!

Loving @teachertapp! So simple but effective – learned so much already just from links to further reading. Ideal for jazzing up our school CPD.

I love @teachertapp. It’s my new favourite thing!

I love a survey (don’t judge me)! So daily teaching surveys? Amazing! OK, maybe do judge me… Enjoying the tips too; quick and easy reads.

It’s now the last work related thing I do each day. It’s quite a therapeutic addition to my daily routine.

Ready for Week 2?

We really hope you’ve enjoyed taking part in Teacher Tapp this week. Over the next 7 days we will be asking questions about your experience of the app so far. Please give us truthful feedback to make things better!

If you’re not yet signed up, get the app via the iPhone App Store or the Android App Store.

You can also check out more at www.teachertapp.co.uk

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