This is a modified version of an article that originally appeared in my Digital Education newsletter.

The Department of Education in England is hoping to recruit an army of retired teachers to help plug the gap when teachers fall in from Covid. Here at Freedman Towers we’ve been waiting for this for the past 18 months. I suppose some people will sign up, but somehow I doubt that it will be in the numbers they hope for or need.

There are five problems as I see it.

Firstly, if the Omicron variant is so rampant that schools may (probably will) have to close, why would it be safe for ex-teachers to step into the breach, especially if they haven't been vaccinated?

Secondly, the workload issue has never gone away, at least not in the time since I qualified as a teacher in 1975. As far back as 1990 I was addressing teacher workload issues in articles and two books. I can't imagine that many ex-teachers would want to go back to all that, especially if the school you end up in has a senior leadership team who expects you to have a detailed written plan for every lesson, a report of how each lesson went, triple marking, and all the rest of it. Er, thanks, but no thanks.

Thirdly, for years and years both the public as a whole and the DfE have been treating teachers with utter disrespect. That, along with the widespread perception of teaching as an easy option, is not likely to prove a huge incentive to return to the classroom. 

Fourthly, will corners be cut as far as being DBS-checked is concerned? To be fair, the DfE has addressed this by encouraging would-be applicants to register with agencies in order to get checked as soon as possible:

Finally, the DfE has called on people to “volunteer”. I assume they don’t mean that to be taken to mean volunteer in the sense of not being paid, especially as their website (below), urges people to sign up with supply teacher agencies. Yet I have seen conversations on Twitter questioning whether ex-teachers are expected to do this out of the goodness of their hearts.

I may be wrong, of course; let's hope I am, for the sake of the kids. If you're interested in going back to teaching, whether full-time or as little as one day a week, see the DfE's information page.