UPDATE 4/11/08: This has been picked up by Teachers TV in their coverage of the credit crunch. I would stress that I don’t believe 30,000 teaching jobs are going to be lost; just that teachers will not be changing jobs so readily.

So you’ve seen the news of banks going down, and you’re sitting smugly thinking teaching is just the safe haven to ride out a financial storm. The more malevolent may be even be cheering as jobless bankers stream from the tall towers of London and New York that were impenetrable financial fortresses until late (but notice it’s never the £1m bonus types that are carrying their cardboard boxes into a taxi!) Teaching seems a world away from the credit crisis, but the inevitable real-economy consequences of all this mess will still affect teachers.

The myth that needs to be exploded is that bankers live in a little bubble: in fact, banking is critical to the flow of money around the economy. As the economy slows, so will the taxes or fees that ultimately pay your salary. If you remain to be convinced, try our beginners guide to the credit crunch, or read the Telegraph article on the after effects.

The short-term effects depend on whether you work for the state or for a private school. State funding and job numbers will obviously remain steady, and a public sector job always has more appeal in hard times. In fact, during the mild 1991 recession teachers leaving the profession in the UK dropped from 14% a year to 8% as teachers clung onto their jobs. A similar drop today would mean that 30,000 fewer teaching posts would become available. It took until 1994 – 3 years - until teachers moved on again (or just retired). So if you have been expecting to climb the ladder quickly, this could hit you.

If you work for a private school then the prognosis is worse. Common wisdom is that the worse affected are prep-schools; the stage before children have started taking ‘critical’ exams. Parents who need to make big cuts to their spending will opt to pull their little darlings out of a private school before the age of 11 but not once they are more embedded in the private system in their teens. Of course most parents will try other money-savers first, but if the recession is long and hard (as this could well be) then school fees are an obvious cut to be made. The worst affected schools will be those who relied heavily on banking bonuses for school fees, but demand for places will probably reduce everywhere. In these times of uncertainly, independent schools certainly won’t be hiring as fast.

In the long-term, teachers in the state sector could well share some hardship as well. The reality is that Western governments across the board have taken on huge extra debts to shore up the banking system. Some of this should get paid back to taxpayers, but not for many years … and not for sure. In the UK, and possibly the US, healthcare spending is going to increase under any new government. So that leaves education as a soft-target for spending cuts. It will happen slowly, but don’t expect any lavish education spending from governments that are going to be counting the pennies for a long while to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.