Growing scarcity of older Teachers in Schools

I was a school pupil back in the 70`s and 80`s, and I remember many of my teachers being of somewhat `advanced` years. Of course to a child or even a teenager anyone over the age of 35 may often, somewhat condescendingly, classed as over the hill - but having perused some old school photographs the average age of my teachers does seem to have been around 40.

These days it seems to be increasing rare to find a school with an abundance of older teachers. Whenever I visit my son`s secondary school I`m shocked at how young all the teachers are, with even the head teacher looking like he`s only just turned 30.

Some people are calling the lack of experienced older teachers an `experience black hole` - indeed it is concerning that so many schools are missing out of teachers who will possess a wealth of experience. I was a teacher myself for more than 25 years, and I can say with certainty that there`s a skill set that only comes with having taught hundreds of classes. Teaching itself is almost like an art form - somewhat ironically perhaps one that cannot be `taught.` I can testify to there being much truth in the old maxim: the teacher learns as much as the pupil. A good teacher will be constantly developing, learning new ways to present a set of concepts, putting a new perspective on certain ideas, all with the aim of getting pupils to see things from a different point of view.

The problem is of course money - teachers are all on a pay scale, and the longer they have been in the profession, the higher their salary. Why would a head teacher, with an ever shrinking yearly budget, choose to employ an older teacher, when they could select a newly qualified teacher for a fraction of the cost? The disparity of income between a new teacher, and someone who has been in the profession for a decade or more could certainly be as much as £20,000.

With the country still in the grip of austerity, and with pay freezes and cuts to a whole range of public sector jobs, it is unlikely that the situation is going to change any time soon. The whole school system is still suffering from a recruitment crisis, with nearly a quarter of the teachers who have qualified since 2011 already having left the profession. It certainly can`t be good for pupils to have teachers leaving midway through their GCSE`s or A-Levels, but that is exactly what is happening in many schools across the country.

If we look at this situation from a purely capitalistic point of view, things can actually become a lot clearer. Because of austerity schools have less income, so they are obliged to keep labor costs down - it will then be an obvious choice to employ 3 newly qualified teachers instead of 2 more experienced teachers. Looking at it this way things make more sense - but schools don`t fit the capitalist model: classrooms aren`t factories, teachers aren`t creating commercial products, or providing a direct service to the paying public. Schools, teachers, and pupils are outside the capitalist model, because they are creating the next generation of workers who will, years down the line, find their place in society. If governments try to force a capitalist model onto the education system, using incongruous concepts such as `increased efficacy` and `greater productivity,` they will only be building up problems for the future.