One of my teachers is leaving in the summer to become head teacher somewhere ridiculously exotic. I'm really pleased for him and he'll make a wonderful head.
We haven't seen too much of him over the last couple of years because as well as being a physics teacher he's also SMT and therefore has a really light timetable, but I'm still going to miss him a lot. He interviewed me when I came for this job and he's always been good to me.
Here's the problem though - the school aren't replacing him. Oh, of course they'll be advertising for a new director of studies but not for a physics teacher.
The thinking is that he only teaches 9 hours a fortnight so colleagues should be able to cover that. Nice idea, but it ain't that simple.
From september we're going to have an extra IB set in year 12 and an extra A2 set in year 13. That's 14 more teaching hours to find from somewhere on top of the 9 we're losing. Suddenly we're down by half a teacher!
That's ok though! The physics specialists can teach 6th form and years 10/11 and year 9 can be taught by biologists and chemists. I don't know about you, but if I was paying many thousands of pounds for my child's education I'd be pissed off to find that they weren't being taught by a specialist.
There is of course one more issue that no one will have spotted. Some one is going to have to show these non-specialists how to do the practicals. Guess who's going to get that job?
*Sigh*
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