Curriculum churn, course swaps, and top-down bullshit are driving talent out the door.
Change is supposed to be progress. But in schools, it’s a never-ending shitshow. A procession of poorly thought-out policies, new faces, new acronyms, and constant disruption. The ground never settles. Teachers are left picking up the pieces while trying to meet targets, keep kids learning, and cling to what’s left of their sanity: “no, no…. I’m fine…I SAID I’M FINE!!!”. The damage isn’t theoretical—it’s fucking everywhere. Burnout, confusion, high turnover, and a profession running on fumes.
The Problem
Change in education is constant, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s almost always pointless, rushed, and divorced from the classroom reality. No vision. No consistency. Just change for the sake of change. Teachers are left trying to hit moving targets with fewer resources, less time, and little stability. Leadership makes big shifts with no warning, no support, and no fucking clue. The only consistency is the chaos.
People are leaving. Good people. Not because they hate kids or hate teaching, but because the job is being made deliberately unworkable by people who think a new seating plan or CPD PowerPoint will fix things. Spoiler alert: it won’t. You don’t retain staff by making their job harder every term. You don’t build improvement by constantly resetting the system. And you sure as shit don’t keep people by erasing everything that made them love the job in the first place.
Causes
Let’s start with the government because they deserve it. These clowns can’t go a full term without reinventing the fucking curriculum. BTECs? T-Levels? Fuck knows what we’re meant to be delivering from one year to the next. It’s like trying to build a house on quicksand while someone keeps hiding your fucking tools. Policy churn isn’t just irritating, it’s fucking destructive. Teachers spend months planning for a spec that gets binned by a minister who’s never set foot in a classroom.
Then there’s SLT. Not all of them—but too many are hooked on buzzwords and top-down bullshit. One term it’s cold calling, next it’s knowledge organisers, then it’s walkthrus, then it’s silent starters, or hinge questions, or cognitive fucking load. It’s not about what’s good—it’s about what’s visible. Something to show the inspector. Something to put on the website. Leadership aren’t leading—they’re reacting to the latest trend like a kid when a wasp flies into the classroom.
Worse, they don’t trust us. Micromanagement is baked into the system. You can’t plan how you know best—you follow the template. You can’t adapt—you implement. You can’t push back—because that means you’re “not on board”. Everything becomes a hoop to jump through. They want robots, not teachers. Which is ironic, given they won’t invest in actual AI, just endless fucking PowerPoints about it.
And then, just when you think you’ve got your shit together, it’s full-on Mad Hatter time—“change places!”—and everyone shifts, adapts, and pretends it makes sense. Timetables rewritten at the last minute. Room changes weekly. Course swaps dumped on you two days before term starts. You walk into school not knowing what you’re teaching, where you’re teaching it, or if the department you’re part of even still exists. It’s chaos. No business would run like this and survive. But somehow we’re expected to functionbecause, apparently, this is just what teaching is now.
All of this fuels churn. The good staff—the lifers, the mentors, the ones holding it all together—they leave. Because the job they signed up for has been drowned in admin, data, and performative nonsense. And when they go? Leadership plugs the gap with some undertrained supply and slaps a “resilience” poster in the staffroom. Fucking dicks.
Say something honest in a meeting and you’re labelled “difficult”. Have a boundary and you’re “not committed”. Raise a valid concern and suddenly you’re “not being positive”. So everyone keeps their heads down and waits for the next reshuffle. It’s survival mode, every fucking term.
Effects
This shit has consequences. Real ones. Psychology Today breaks it down clearly: constant change, without clarity or control, fucks people up.
Teachers are more stressed than ever, and it’s not because they’re “not coping” it’s because they’re being drowned in uncertainty. You don’t know what you’ll be teaching next term. You don’t know which policy will be dumped on you at the next INSET. You’re always firefighting, never settling. That’s not a workload problem, that’s a system problem.
Burnout is everywhere. People don’t even flinch when the next “non-negotiable” is emailed out. They just sigh, copy and paste it into their lesson plan, and move on. The energy’s gone. The spark’s gone. Teachers are still showing up—but they’re checked out. Change fatigue has set in.
Identity takes a hit too. Most teachers don’t just clock in and clock out—they care. Deeply. But when you’re told to follow a script, stripped of autonomy, and undermined by every passing fad, it stops feeling like your job. You’re not teaching. You’re performing someone else’s idea of what teaching should look like, and badly.
Students suffer too. They get inconsistency, rushed planning, fragmented support. And when their favourite teacher quits it affects them. Massively. But no one measures that. No one puts that in the data drop.
Solutions
This isn’t a call to freeze all change. But for fuck’s sake—can we have change that makes sense?
Start with stability. If something’s working, let it bed in. Stop tearing things up every September. Keep staff in the same courses where you can. Stop dicking about with rooms and timetables just because you can. Let teachers plan properly and teach what they’re good at.
Next: actually ask teachers what they think. Before rolling out your next whole-school initiative, ask the people who will have to deliver it. Then listen. Then adjust. Stop treating consultation like a formality. Staff are not fucking foot soldiers—they’re professionals.
Cut the micromanagement. You want progress? Trust teachers. Let them adapt. Let them innovate. Let them teach like humans, not checklists. Drop the performative bollocks and back the people actually doing the job.
And sort the fucking retention crisis. It’s not just “workload”; start fixing the things that actually drive people out: the churn, the chaos, the endless demands with no payoff. If someone’s good at their job, keep them. Treat them with respect. Pay them properly. Back them up.
Conclusion
Schools don’t need more slogans. They need less bullshit. They don’t need to be “moving forward” if it means running staff into the ground. They need calm. Stability. Respect. Stop changing everything all the fucking time. Stop chasing optics. Start listening. Because if this constant flux continues, you won’t have a workforce left to change with.
