General Election 2017 - Your Views: '˜Crisis in teaching must be reversed' says Leeds school head

There is a huge staffing crisis currently facing our education system and it is a major election issue that I want all our politicians to address.

We had 50,000 teachers leave the profession last year. That wasn’t because of them reaching retirement age – it was because they simply couldn’t cope with the kind of bureaucracy that has been created in education.

Things are being thrown at us all the time that are irrelevant and funding has been removed.

If you look at the budgetary cuts that local authorities are going to have to implement, the average school is going to have around £430 less per pupil by 2019/20.

If we were to manage and sustain those losses, that would be equivalent to six teachers being lost. How are schools supposed to deliver good quality education to children with those kinds of cuts?

At the moment, four out of 10 teachers are quitting education within five years of qualifying. At our conference at Easter, I spoke to a number of newly-qualified teachers who were leaving teaching within two years or less. It was absolutely heartbreaking. They were saying they simply couldn’t sustain it, because it was impossible to try and keep up with what was expected.

People are working late into the night marking. They are in early and working at weekends, and some are working 60 hours plus a week. That is not sustainable. I have heard stories of people marking schoolwork with their child crying at their ankles. But they just have to finish that marking because everything has to be checked. This not a healthy working environment.

The pressure comes right from the top.