Browsing through the DfE website looking for information on the new Minister of State for Schools I was diverted on to the pages about ‘becoming a teacher’- I refused to use the rather slang wording of ‘getintoteaching’ used by the DfE. Many readers will raise a hollow laugh at what follows:

You’ll get more days holiday than people in many other professions. In school, full-time teachers work 195 days per year.

For comparison, you’d work 227 days per year (on average) if you worked full time in an office.

Salaries and benefits | Get Into Teaching (education.gov.uk)

To think teachers work for 39 weeks a year whereas other office workers must toil for an additional six weeks. The DfE site says nothing about the length of the working day and the use of part of this difference in holidays as employer-driven flexitime to compensate for attendance at activities such as parents’ evenings, being present on exam results days and the days before term starts and finishes not included in the 5 days pupils are not in attendance over the 190 days of teaching. Marking and preparation at home outside the working day aren’t mentioned either.

The danger of this type of false encouragement is that new entrants either come believing it to be a fact or recognise it isn’t during their preparation course and have to decide whether they are prepared to accept the real terms and conditions around teaching and not the advertising spin put out by the DfE.

Of course, classroom management does enable teachers to acquire some useful transferable skills and with the buoyant labour market that fact will be a risk for the new Ministerial Team if other employers look to unhappy teachers to fill gaps in their workforce. But, of course, teachers unhappy with working in state schools in England need not change careers, but rather can opt for the private sector either in this country or almost anywhere else in the world.

The more marketable are teachers and their skills, the more the Secretary of State will have to worry about the levelling up agenda. Rolling out a vaccination programme with cooperative NHS staff will seem like a dream task compared with managing catch-up and staffing challenging schools.