How The Pandemic Has Killed Off Teaching As A Career

Teacher numbers are in freefall, but while efforts to halt the slide focus on pay and workload, it's a side-effect of the pandemic that may yet prove fatal to recruitment: the rise of home-working.

The shortage of qualified teachers is rapidly becoming the biggest problem facing education, as fewer people enter the profession and more leave the classroom prematurely.

The situation is particularly acute at secondary level, with students increasingly being taught by non-specialists and school leaders struggling to fill vacancies, in some subjects, including physics, computing and foreign languages.

Almost half of public schools in the U.S. have at least one teacher vacancy, with a quarter having multiple vacancies. In the U.K. a report this week revealed that the number of vacancies is almost double pre-Covid levels.

Pay and workload are, as you'd expect, contributory factors. Teacher pay, the subject of an ongoing strike in England, has slipped behind that of other professions, while workload is the principal reason cited by teachers quitting the classroom.

Both pay and workload are solvable, given the political will. But there is another factor that is more intractable and may end up killing off teaching as a career, at least as we know it, and the pandemic is to blame.

The pandemic has been the tipping point that has taken working from home from a minority pursuit to the mainstream.

Although most employees are now back in the office, for many that is part of a hybrid model that sees them working two or three days a week from home.

More than four in 10 graduates in comparable professions to teaching now working mainly from home, according to analysis of data from the U.K.'s Labour Force Survey, carried out by the independent National Foundation for Educational Research.

As the graph shows, this represents a rapid increase on pre-pandemic levels, while the pandemic did not significantly affect the number of teachers working from home.

Underlying this trend is a shift in mindset: the expectation that a graduate job will include some element of working from home.

Many graduates who would never previously have considered the prospect of working from home would now see it as a normal.

And many of those who enter the workforce eager to be surrounded by colleagues will find that enthusiasm waning as their careers progress.

Teaching is no longer competing with a range of office-based professions, but with a host of careers offering the flexibility teachers can only dream of.

And although recent graduates may be particularly drawn to the possibility of flexible working, even those who have been in the classroom for some time may start to envy friends who spend more time at home.

Unlike some other pandemic-related restrictions, there is no sign this trend is going to reverse: once people have tasted the benefits of working from home they are reluctant to give them up.

More parents working from home means students learning from home is more conceivable, but not only would this deny children the opportunity to practice crucial social skills, this is not an option that is going to work for everyone.

While some teachers are able to fulfil some of their contracted hours out of school - particularly for activities such as lesson planning and marking - the nature of the job means that flexible working is often not a realistic option.

Changing this will require a rethink of how schools work, perhaps through more remote teaching. The use of technology in the classroom made huge strides during the pandemic, but its biggest challenge may lie ahead.

Unless we are going to resign ourselves to a future of fewer teachers, schools will need to figure out a way to adapt to a world where working from home is the norm.