A status-based crisis of teacher shortages? A discussion

The theory of status, applied by Ovenden-Hope (2022) to the current crisis of teacher shortages, helps to identify one of the underlying factors that impact teachers entering the teaching workforce in England. In this appreciative response to her paper, I argue that the structural factors that have come about with the neoliberal policy agenda of the last 40 years have impacted the status of teaching and the educative purpose, and that without a clear understanding of, and willingness to oppose, these structural factors, it is unlikely that we will solve the recruitment/retention challenge. These factors contribute to the low esteem in which teachers are held because of their perceived short period of training; public knowledge and curriculum access; the reconfiguring of teachers from knowledgeable guides to deliverers of content; and the co-option of the teaching profession as an arm of the state. The neoliberal or marketised teleology of education militates against the historic status of the teacher, and it is unlikely that teacher status will improve while they are teaching in an education system geared to the production of economically active adults