How to retain teachers in the current climate?

Damian Hinds’ recognition of the need for a new teacher retention and recruitment strategy is to be welcomed (Fewer emails, more job shares: a new strategy to retain teachers, 26 January), but his proposals don’t get to the heart of the matter. As numerous studies have shown, it is not workload but what teachers perceive as the increase in unnecessary and unproductive tasks that is the main problem. The most burdensome of these tasks is recording, inputting, monitoring and analysing data, which teachers feel takes time away from more useful activities like lesson planning and interaction with pupils. Many acknowledge that the need for this emphasis on data management stems from the government’s approach to accountability and the lack of trust in teachers this entails.What is required is a change of ethos where teachers are regarded as trusted professionals rather than managed employees. The idea of trust seems far too nebulous and open to interpretation for the business model now operating in most schools, even when at the level of rhetoric it is a much-used term. In the present circumstances, the ideal relationship of trust between the government and the profession does not exist, and I see no evidence that things are about to change. The “blame the teacher” culture is still alive and well, reinforced by the dog-eat-dog system created by high-stakes testing, league tables, performance-related pay, privatisation/academisation and other so-called reforms of recent years, all driven by the choice agenda and market ideology.