Ten Statistics That Should Be Researched: Number 7 Number of posts readvertised

There is a lot of spin that happens in teaching, and there are a lot of unpleasant schools in which to work. So, when searching for a teaching job, it is necessary to learn to read between the lines in order to figure out whether the school is really right for you. It certainly won’t be immediately obvious.

One tactic is to look at other job vacancies at your institution of choice, and over time, look for patterns in them. Alarm bells might ring if you see a lot of vacancies, and they should start to ring louder if you see the same post advertised more than once. I can think of some establishments I’ve been involved in myself, where I’ve followed the adverts over a number of years, and seen the same job advertised every year.

How often does this happen? I bet it’s a lot. If the retention rate of people in the profession as a whole is low, then the actual number of jobs that just aren’t getting filled for very long has got to be accordingly high. Of course, it’s more a reflection of the school or college itself, in that it can’t hang on to staff. But where do those staff go? Another school, or another career?

Of course, in the current climate, a lot more people are hanging on to their jobs than usual, so this will naturally be less severe than normal. But what if the job advert situation is compared to other careers? Surely all careers are affected by the recession in more or less the same way? I think if we talk in percentages, then a definite pattern of excessive readvertising in teaching will be shown.

So what does this say about the profession? Teachers are struggling to find a job that they feel comfortable in, and those positions that do have poor working conditions attached are only filled temporarily. Are there any other career paths where the workers cherry pick the good jobs and turn down business in the others in the same way?


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