Everyone likes a good collective noun, don’t they? A murmuration of starlings. A glint of goldfish. A number of statisticians.
It’s a parlour game that never gets tired, a perennial source of next-to-the-till Christmas stocking-filler books.
So here’s one for a rainy period five on a Friday: what is the collective noun for a group of teachers? So many options: a lesson of teachers, a staffroom of teachers, a correction of teachers.
The right answer, however, is this: a drove. A drove of teachers. Sample use: “A drove of teachers is leaving the profession.”
Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney – who, as joint general secretaries of the NEU teachers’ union, know a thing or two about collectivising teachers – have sent an uncompromising letter to the new education secretary (still Gillian Keegan at the time of writing, though it’s always a good idea to check, just in case).
In their letter, they point out that desperate measures are needed in order to retain “teachers who continue to leave in droves”. Specifically, Keegan needs to give schools the necessary funds to enable them to pay teachers and support staff an above-inflation pay rise.
The use of “drove” as a collective noun applies only to teachers, however. Once you factor in teaching assistants and other support staff, it becomes a different grouping: school staff. A different grouping needs a different collective noun. And so we have: a quitting of school staff.
More than a third of education workers, including teachers and teaching assistants, have either already taken steps to leave the profession or are actively considering it, according to a YouGov poll for the Trades Union Congress. Thirty-four per cent of respondents said that they were considering quitting their jobs over low pay and poor conditions.
(As an aside: the TUC survey also highlighted the correct collective noun for a group of press officers. The union comment accompanying the survey stated that “Without decent pay rises for key workers in the public sector, we face a mass exodus of staff.” An exodus is by definition a mass departure – a fact overlooked by the TUC’s tautology of press officers.)
But support staff – ever the overlooked Cinderellas of the school sector – deserve their own collective noun, too. Remove the teachers, and the quitting of school staff becomes something else: a bargaining of support staff.
Unions representing school support staff have accepted a pay offer of an extra £1,925 this year, equivalent to a 10.5 per cent increase for those at the bottom of the pay scale. For those at the top, it is slightly more than four per cent. Members of Unison, GMB and Unite were consulted over a two-month period, before agreeing to the offer this week.
The glaring problem here is that no-one has worked out the minor detail of where the cash is actually going to come from. This makes it less a pay negotiation and more the kind of question you might give a graduate at a management-consultancy interview. How many ping-pong balls can you fit in a 747? How can you pay half a million support staff with no money? Or, as an alternative analogy: it’s like the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer deciding to subsidise energy bills while cutting taxes. Thus: a liability of politicians.
Unsurprisingly, headteachers have said that the support-staff pay rise could break their budgets, unless the government provides them with extra cash to cover it. Which brings us to the next of our collective nouns: a stress of headteachers.
A report from UCL’s Institute of Education has revealed that headteachers’ work-related anxiety more than doubled at the peak of the pandemic. The survey of more than 13,000 teachers and heads showed that one in four heads was “highly anxious” about work. This figure increased significantly during the pandemic, peaking in January 2021, when 65 per cent of heads said that they felt anxious about work.
Period five is beginning to seem somewhat interminable now, a long walk in the driving rain an ever-more attractive option. But no: inexorably, the parlour game continues. A Tes analysis revealed that the number of vacancies for teachers or school leaders is up by 67 per cent in some subjects, compared with pre-pandemic levels. Computing, geography, music and chemistry are the worst-hit subjects, with vacancy levels up by more than 50 per cent on the 2019-20 academic year.
The problem with this sort of year-on-year comparisons is that it suggests 2019-20 as a baseline of normality. In fact, situation was already pretty bad by then; consequently, it is now worse than bad. An impoverishment of teacher vacancies, anyone? A predictable disaster of post-pandemic consequences?
“Predictable disaster”, however, is to education what “flock” is to the animal world: an all-purpose collective noun, likely to fit the bill in the vast majority of situations.
And so we have a predictable disaster of abandoned plans, as the government’s drive for all schools to be part of a multi-academy trust by 2030 stutters to a halt. School leaders have said that they are “focusing on survival” over growth, which is a coded way of saying that they’ve had to burn all their Brené Brown books to heat the trust offices.
But there is one collective noun we haven’t mentioned yet. New government figures show that the number of school referrals to child social services has increased by 50 per cent since 2014. Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders said that cuts to children’s social services has meant that overworked teachers are left to pick up the pieces.
So, yes: an exhaustion of pastoral and safeguarding leads. But also, noticeably: a forgotten of children.
Click here to read Adi Bloom’s This Week In Education column every week.
