Why There Will Never Be Enough Teachers

Schools are playing surrogate families, and it just doesn't work

Rishi Sunak pledged this week to tackle the “anti-maths mindset” in the UK. Personally, useless English graduate that I am, I feel slightly threatened by the statement, but good luck to him.

Sunak’s announcement led to Labour banging a familiar drum: “all well and good, but what about the government’s long-term inability to recruit new Maths teachers?” It’s a fair point. We are told there is a chronic shortage, despite the government having long offered new Maths teachers literally tens of thousands of pounds, tax-free, to just stay in the job for a few years

But it’s not just Maths teachers—teacher recruitment figures are tanking across the board, with graduate recruits down 20% overall. Many of us know teachers, so we’ve probably heard it all before: they’re fed up.

The causes of this are varied—the very fact that some subjects struggle more than others attests to this. But even if you could address the Maths imbalance, the big problems driving teachers out of the job would remain: overwork, bureaucracy, and lack of resources. Successfully recruiting and retaining enough Maths teachers would just mean hundreds more adults crying into their scientific calculators at 11:45pm at night.

The fact is, the nature of our current education system means that we will never have enough teachers. The impossibility of the job is a feature, not a bug, because we have placed a burden upon schools which they are not designed to carry: the burden of the overall wellbeing of our children.

Schools have ceased to be simply places where children gain an education, and perhaps learn to be good citizens. Little by little, since the advent of mass education in the 1800s, and especially since the Butler Act absorbed most C of E schools into the state sector in 1944, British schools have expanded their remit. Far beyond simply being responsible for developing a child’s intellect, they have become responsible for cultivating their entire person.