IN recent years teachers have been bombarded with demands, plans and strategies to improve educational standards. The climate has been one of constant change and the pressures for higher performance relentless. This has taken its toll on a weary profession. The current teacher shortage and retention problems are simply by-products of a system that has successively undermined and distrusted the profession. Enough is enough.

With a shortage of teachers, the least attractive jobs remain unfilled, newly-qualified teachers have an unprecedented bargaining power, and we look to other countries for spare staff, irrespective of quality.

What is most worrying is that this situation is unlikely to be short-term and will not be easily resolved. Financial incentives or snappy advertising will not turn the tide of disillusion. For teachers leaving the profession, the main reasons are paper- rather than pupil-related. The impossible task of balancing pupils’ learning needs with ever greater demands for paperwork has led some teachers to burn out or get out.

So how do we move forward? How do we rejuvenate the profession and convince bright graduates that teaching is a career worth pursuing?

First, there needs to be a reduction in the amount of change imposed upon schools and teachers. This is not to suggest that government-led innovations are inherently bad but simply that they have overloaded the system.

Multiple innovations have a tendency to fight each other for space, time and energy. Teachers grappling simultaneously with curriculum changes, syllabus changes, AS-levels and national strategies will find it difficult to implement all of them completely or indeed, well. The legacy of innovation overload is well-known across many counties. It results in poor implementation and the experience of change as an ever-moving conveyor belt with teachers running frantically to stand still.

Any successful change requires a period of consolidation, where development continues but at a pace where modification and refinement is possible. This is unlikely to occur while schools face multiple changes and competing priorities.

Second, there needs to be a re-allocation of time between paperwork and classroom work. A head of science recently commented to me that she “managed her department from the classroom door because of her heavy teaching load”. If we want teachers to be managers or leaders, time has to be provided away from the classroom.

In a business context it would be unthinkable for a management responsibility to be simply added to a person’s job in the hope that they would somehow find the time to fulfil their extra responsibilities. By reducing the external demands upon schools there is the possibility of freeing up time to manage and most importantly time to teach. Teachers are frustrated by the way in which non-teaching tasks take them away from pupils. They are right to be: research evidence underlines the importance of the quality of teacher-pupil relationships in school improvement.

Third, there needs to be re-establishment of trust in teachers. The spectre of inspection continues to loom over the profession, despite promises of a more benevolent approach. While the “naming, blaming and shaming“days may be over, issues around failing schools and failing teachers remain.

This inevitably raises the question of teacher professionalism and whether teachers can be trusted to do their job without surveillance. In order to reclaim their professional autonomy, teachers need to re-establish trust both within the profession and outside it. They need to demonstrate that they can self-monitor, regulate and evaluate themselves. The General Teaching Council’s draft professional learning framework offers a set of guiding expectations for teachers and school leaders that brings this possibility a step closer.

Standards are unlikely to rise if there are empty classrooms or incompetent teachers employed simply to plug the gaps. Consequently, it is time to reduce the bureaucratic burdens that face teachers. It is time to slow down the pace of innovation and change to acceptable levels that allow teachers to get on with teaching. It is time to trust teachers to establish, sustain and monitor their own profession without interference. It’s about trust and it’s about time.

Dr Alma Harris is professor of school leadership at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick