#ShoutOutForTeachers – Celebrate your teachers!

Like any profession, when teachers feel appreciated and supported, schools and students thrive as a result.

With budget cuts, forced redundancies, longer hours with less support staff and larger class sizes, it’s no surprise that we’re in the midst of a recruitment and retention crisis. Many say that both teachers and school leadership staff are being driven out of teaching by increased workloads and unachievable expectations.

The statistics around the number of teachers leaving the profession are increasingly recognised and teacher wellbeing has become more of a concern particularly in the last few years. In fact, the Department of Education’s figures show the rate of qualified teachers entering teaching has fallen to its lowest in five years.

The expectations from schools, parents and the government are higher than ever and with that comes an amount of pressure set on teacher’s shoulders before they even enter the classroom. Of course, it’s right that we would want the very best people to be teaching our children, but with that should also come a level of support, encouragement and involvement.

Teachers come into schools ready and willing to make a difference to the lives of young people and so it is a responsibility of us all to ensure they feel supported.

That’s why we’ve recently launched our #ShoutOutForTeachers campaign in which we’ve asked people to take to social media and tell us about a teacher who has made a difference to them or their children. Our aim is to get a positive topic trending and reach people who deserve recognition for the great job they do every day.

As well as encouraging parents to get involved, we’re also asking schools to get behind this and encourage their students to take to Facebook or Twitter to let the world know about a teacher who has made a difference to them. For many teachers, just one single post saying thanks could be enough to turn a bad day, week or month into a good one – after all, for many teachers, improving the lives of the young people they teach is exactly the reason they do it every day.

If you have great memories of a teacher, or if you think highly of your children’s teachers, why not join us and celebrate them using their name, school and the hashtag #ShoutOutForTeachers.