Sabbaticals or career breaks should be offered to teachers to stop thousands leaving the profession, according to a headteachers’ union and a leading think tank.
Teachers should be able to take a break from the classroom while being paid a small retainer and would be expected to return on “keep in touch” days similar to those for women on maternity leave, they said.
The idea of sabbaticals or paid career breaks for teachers, even if they are paid small sums, may be greeted with scepticism by those who already criticise their long holidays including a six-week summer break.
A series of essays published by the think tank Policy Exchange, which has close links to Conservative ministers, and the Association of School and College Leaders union, highlighted a problem of “burn-out” among experienced teachers who quit the profession, worsening a recruitment crisis.
Several contributors said heads of individual schools or groups of academies, rather than the government, should take responsibility for new steps to improve retention rates of their teachers, such as moving them to a less demanding role or offering a break.
Advertisement
Jonathan Simons, head of education at Policy Exchange, said in his essay it would probably be prohibitively expensive for schools or the government to offer teachers paid sabbaticals. “But it may be possible, as a more formal version of the ‘keep in touch days’, for schools increasingly to employ people on the shared understanding that they may teach for a while, leave for a while, and then come back in,” he wrote.
“Schools and teachers may wish to design some sort of low stakes ‘retainer’ on both sides, offering a chance of a rapid reintroduction back into the school for that individual if it suited both parties at a point in the future.”
The growth of academy chains running several schools meant they could offer more radical forms of flexible working than currently to “burned out” teachers by moving them to another role at a different school to stop them from leaving, he said.
Each year 6,000 women teachers aged 30-39 leave the classroom to look after their own children but only half return, he said. Another 29,000 teachers quit state schools before retirement.