That too many early-career teachers prematurely leave the profession is no longer a secret.

That too many teachers of child-rearing age leave the profession because they can no longer balance the demands of the job and the demands of parenthood is no longer a secret.

That too many older teachers cannot keep going and leave the profession before retirement age is no longer a secret.

It is all there in the statistics: we somehow manage to lose both too many young teachers from the classroom (one in seven doesn’t make it to the end of the NQT year) and too many experienced ones (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development recently found that the UK has the youngest profession in Europe).

Today marks the culmination of Tes’ NQT Week (a series of articles on tes.com/news), with Jamie Thom’s brilliant feature in today’s Tes magazine on how we can stem the haemorrhaging of young teachers.

Thom identifies that, for all the training and research support we could and should be offering NQTs (and, to be clear, the Early Career Framework (ECF) published by the Department for Education this year is very welcome), the key to this is mentoring.

Evidence shows us that genuine, supportive, scaffolded mentoring is essential if early-career teachers are to blossom. I’d bet you a pound to a penny that, given the opportunity and space to properly support new colleagues, older teachers would often also find new enthusiasm for their work.

All of which begs the rather obvious questions: why doesn’t this happen enough in our schools? And why are too many young teachers (with or without the ECF) experiencing a killer combination of both enormous pressure and hideous isolation? The answer to both is, as is too often the case (I feel rather like a stuck record), the punitive accountability regime that suffocates schools. A combination of accountability measures, leagues tables, inspection and the threat of academisation or rebrokering makes for a fairly hideous cocktail.

The culture of workload, targets, data entry, performance management and the rest is often too much to bear for new entrants. And who can blame them?

Despite this, it is not possible - or even desirable - to go back to the rose-tinted world of the past where teachers, leaders and schools were left to do as they pleased. There are too many children and there is too much cash at stake for that. However, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t yearn and push for a much, much better system.

While the pressures are greater than they should be, there is still a need for accountability. There are plenty of people working to reduce these pressures, including Ofsted boss Amanda Spielman, who has a lessening of the target culture as one of the admirable ambitions for her new inspection framework.

But still, as it stands, too many schools are simply not happy places: to borrow a phrase, they are “toxic”. That is why so many teachers are fleeing the profession. Research exercise after research exercise tells us that.

But there is some good news to give us reason for hope: recent polling shows that what parents want most from their chosen primary school is that their offspring should be happy and safe. (Presumably that also means not being educated in the middle of a metaphorical pressure cooker.)

As the political parties mass for their conferences and start drafting manifestos for the election that is surely coming, there are far worse places for them to start, when looking at schools, than thinking about how we can ensure that our children - and their teachers - are happy, safe and supported.

@Ed_Dorrell

This article originally appeared in the 20 September 2019 issue under the headline “Prop NQTs up - or risk the entire system crashing down”