 If you choose to work in a challenging school, it could quite be the end of your career. My name's Ross from Teacher Toolkit and this video explains why I left teaching after 25 years. There are two key reasons why I chose to leave teaching. Number one is a deputy headteacher working 60 hour weeks to be then told that your work is still not good enough, something had to give. The other side of this is also as Teacher Toolkit having blogged for 10 years and now with a quarter of a million followers, trying to meet that demand, trying to reply to everyone and help other people also made that a full time job on top of the day job. What if off-stead outcomes were unreliable? What if good teachers not only came to the profession but chose to work in a disadvantaged school? It is my belief that the off-stead inspection in its current framework does not recognise schools working in different contexts and here lies the problem. Choose to work in a challenging school in a difficult circumstance and it could come back to haunt you. And in my last 10 years that's happened to me twice in a school leadership position. What happens on the ground is if off-stead say they are looking for certain things then as a school leader you will jump through those hoops to not only ensure good outcome comes for your students but to protect your own livelihood. We need to get to a place where the inspection regime looks at those teachers who choose to work in a tough school to get the best for their kids but aren't penalised personally. If only 19% of 1500 parents who are surveyed only read the full report why do we as teachers get so obsessed with them ourselves or put banners all over our school gates to celebrate? We all need a pat on the back recognition of our hard work but I don't think the current way of how we celebrate the hard work is the right way for our education system. The fear narrative is very real until our inspection or accountability regime recognise that schools work in different contexts then we're going to just generate this football manager type syndrome where the end of your teaching career is simply one inspection away. For the last six months I've been travelling and visiting schools working with teachers and for me it's very clear particularly when an off-stead inspection happens it's a jump or swim situation. A recent report published by the University College London suggests what the impact of inspections are on teacher attrition. If a school is judged inadequate about 4% of the profession within that school will leave compared to zero in a school that's graded outstanding. In my case I had to go part time as a deputy head teacher and work one day a week as teacher toolkit before the inspection this was fine. After the inspection that decision became untenable. Until we change the dialogue I won't be signing up for headship anytime soon. I'm all for high accountability and I do think we should have a school inspection framework but I do think we need to do two quick fixes one we need to change the off-stead gradings two most importantly is off-stead need to answer this simple question do you accept schools work in different contexts and if so we then need to get to a place where we look at schools over maybe a three-year period in terms of performance and we also start to group schools within a family of similar schools and judge them against one another rather than what we currently have which has a one-size-fits-all for everyone and then you're penalized if you choose to work in a challenge in school. Now I know I'm not alone about 34,000 teachers chose to leave the profession last year I would like by speaking out more teachers to come to me not just to share negative stories but the positive stories and you can do so through teachertoolkit.co.uk download resources connect with this video connect with all the social media channels so if you follow teacher toolkit on Twitter Instagram Facebook I would love to hear from you