Because in the private sector we have nowhere to go. We either sink or swim, there is nobody to cry to, no weeks and weeks holiday, no weekends off, they have it EASY.

For the record, both my parents were teachers.

ETA: My dad was so stressed, he had the time and energy to start his own business on the side. Both were excellent teachers and worked damned hard at it.

There is undoubtedly stress in this as in any job, but the Ofsted guy is correct. I know several teachers and some are good well adjusted happy people, others would be flakes whatever their job choice. My daughter went to a school where the head had been sacked and a new one installed. I asked him what he was doing to raise standards and he said I am sacking wasters and bringing in teachers who want to teach. He did just that and the school gained top marks, he now works for ofsted.
There is a problem with some parents attitudes but the biggest problem is weak headmasters letting parents dictate. The example of the lad being told to shut up is a classic case. Had the head just said that the son was unruly and it was correct then perhaps they would have all learnt a lesson but they are scared of upsetting anyone. Tell a kid the aren't as good as another is now deemed wrong but if they aren't told how will they develop.

I hope this guy really gets things moving and that all the kids are allowed to get the education they desrve.

Most schools now have policies banning all types of phone, kindle, ipod or other electronic device in the school.

Several reasons – they are disruptive in class, the school gets hassle when they get lost, stolen or broken.

In practice, the schools don’t care if the devices are kept in bags on silent and only used at appropriate times.

perhaps its because those of us who live and work with teachers see what a daft and banal statement the head of ofsted made.

as someone married to a teacher, i see the almost weekly changes ofsted make to their framework for assessing a schools effectiveness.

one week a school could get a good, 3 weeks later the framework changes and the same school would have got a failing rating.

try having doing your job and being given a new set of targets each month to meet / strive to for your annual report and see if you feel like its a level playing field.

also remember that the teachers deal with what comes through the door when it comes to the kids, sometimes they are nice kids but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, yet many of them try year on year.

the people you work with are interviewed for the jobs, you may not get on with all of them, but none of them just walk in off the street and sit at a desk as they live just round the corner.

As someone who trained as a teacher but didn't finish the course at least in part due to stress, I agree with every word of that.

However, one of the biggest problems we have in schools is with discipline.

We've managed to put kids on an absurdly lofty pedestal, where they can claim their 'human rights' in classrooms over any behaviour, and no disciplinary procedure really works until it's too late.

Think back to your school days and the punishments metered out:

-Being sent out of the class - you can't do this any more as the teacher has a responsibility to keep them in the room.
-Being taken outside by a teacher and shouted at - you can't be left alone with a child, and shouting is heavily discouraged.
-Detention - nowadays has to be approved of in advance by parents. Usually the parents don't, so the kids don't turn up.
-Being sent to do your work in an extraction room - they also have to be booked in advance - see how many kids turn up.
-Lines - deemed 'demoralising' nowadays.
-Confiscating offending property - the kids know you can't lay a finger on them, so they clutch onto it with all their might. If you prise it out of their fingers, it's 'assault' and you'll be in trouble.

You know what? You can't even use sarcasm any more. The only 'punishment' you can meter out is to move a kid to another location within the classroom, which makes the square-root of bugger-all difference.

So, what happens instead is that the teacher stands powerless at the front of the classroom, being taken to the cleaners by the kids in the lower tiers. If you're not academically strong, you'll be in classes like this and you won't be going anywhere.

The only real punishment a school has is exclusion, which has to be agreed with the local authority. These have increased, largely because there are no other effective punishments that can be metered out along the way.

And then there are the lessons. Ludicrously prescriptive due to 'child-centred learning', which deliberately avoids challenging the kids with new and different things. Also, rather than helping kids develop long attention spans, it caters for shorter ones, so no activity within a lesson can realistically last longer than 10 minutes. You have to include a 'starter' and a 'plenary' to make sure the kids know what they're going to learn, then what they have learnt, in every lesson. As a result, no matter how enthusiastic and passionate a teacher is about their subject these days, their lesson is prescribed from the top down for every waking minute. My best teachers were the ones who could effectively deliver a 45-minute lecture, and you'd have such rapt attention you'd never feel the need for other distractions. They would also 'rip up the rule book' and let the lesson flow. Tellingly, when I went back to my old school, all those teachers had retired early. You can't teach the way they did any more, which means that if I was a kid in school today, I wouldn't learn as much.

Then you're expected to deal with all the kids' problems. Cost-slashing under the Mandelson-PR'd banner of 'inclusion', Labour closed several special schools and PRUs, meaning that mainsteam education is expected to accommodate children with severe behavioural difficulties and learning disabilities alongside all the other kids, which slows lessons right down trying to cater for them.

Teachers just can't get on and 'teach', and the blame falls with four things:

-A dearth of responsibility within society in general, where discipline and respect aren't enforced at home and teachers are effectively expected to bring up the kids because the real parents can't be bothered.

-A constant churn of government 'initiatives', constantly changing and meddling with what kids and teachers are meant to be doing. Problem is, an education reform's effect won't truly be seen until the kids involve leave school, but governments always looking for re-election want to point to results NOW. As a result, education reforms overlap and have very little measurable effect. Also, in order to massage pass rates, kids aren't expected to do anything particularly challenging. The 'EBacc', which was proposed and written off as 'elitist', would have merely been a return to the curriculum everyone had to follow when I was at school back in the '90s.

-Teaching unions, who rarely have their own members interests at heart, and are more like far-Left pressure groups. The reason why there were so many strikes over the Tories education reforms recently were absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the reforms were a good thing, and everything to do with the fact they were introduced by the Tories. Labour repeatedly swung wrecking balls into the education system when they were in power, and the unions didn't respond at all, because it was Labour, and everything they do is OK. Also, the average teacher knows very little about politics, so the unions seek to indoctrinate them right from their recruitment. I remember whole seminars where we were told to unquestionably vote Labour as they would 'protect us', and the stifling political correctness that leaches through schools making white working-class boys feel worthless is all union-driven.

-OfStEd, whose criteria for judging the effectiveness of schools is laughable, and whose inspectors rarely if ever have any experience of education at all.

But above all, we really do need to reconfigure our school system around the German tripartite system (something we were originally going to do until the public schools kicked up a fuss on the planning committee as they saw them as a threat to their 'superiority'). At the moment you can only 'succeed' in a British school if you're academically or scientifically minded. Not everyone is, nor does the country need everyone to be, and to force everyone through this particular chip-cutter is farcical. We need scientific/technical and arts/humanities divisions at the very least. That way, the 11-plus (which I'd move up to 13, keeping the kids in more topic-based learning within Middle-schools catering for ages 9-13) wouldn't be seen as condemning half the kids to a life of underachievement, but rather helping them to focus their skills.

At the moment, though, we're on the edge of some serious difficulties. The lack of employment opportunities, the non-degrees, the overprovision of universities, the lack of discipline stretching into adulthood - they're coming back to bite us.

I don't think we've seen the worst of the societal ravages that are a knock-on effect of Labour's education 'reforms'.

Blimey. You'd think a teacher would know the difference between "metered" and "meted"

Good thing he's not a teacher.

I guess your teachers must have been pretty crap given the reading skills you've displayed

I wonder how stressful it would be if the children all sat facing the front and shut the fk up.

Teachers have brought this all on themselves and us with decades of wishy washy, namby pamby, do gooding bks.

Excessive red tape doesn't help but once they lost control of the pupils they were finished.

Remove all rights from children. Punish parents. Discipline children.

Show the little fkers who the boss is and stop trying to be their friend.

I know quite a few teachers and funnily enough the ones who don't find it stressful weirdly happen to be the ones who control their classes and command respect.

I would vote for you

A lot of teachers I know agree with you, but they are powerless to do anything.

Public or private sector?