POOR pay and excessive workload has led to a whopping two-fifths of teachers jumping ship within a year of qualifying, while their classrooms are being taken over by untrained staff.

New analysis from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) revealed that just 62 per cent of teachers who qualified in 2011 — the latest year that figures are available — were in teaching jobs a year later.

The revelation follows ATL’s call for an investigation into the scourge of unqualified support staff being “mis-used” to teach lessons.

ATL general secretary Mary Bousted blasted the “crisis happening right at the very start of teachers’ careers” in her address to the union’s annual conference.

The figures included almost 11,000 teachers never taking a job after qualifying, she said. “Why are we losing the next generation of teachers — that new blood for the profession which should be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of promise and ambition?” she asked. “Is it that they learn as they work with exhausted and stressed colleagues that teaching has become a profession which is incompatible with a normal life? “Trainee and newly qualified teachers cannot fail to understand that, despite Michael Gove’s intentions, teaching has become a profession monitored to within an inch of its life.”

In the same session the conference passed a motion noting that teaching assistants were increasingly expected to step up and cover full lessons.

Assistants were forced to abandon special educational needs students to take charge and were paid a measly £2 an hour supplement, delegate Julie Huckstep told the hall.

She said a colleague had left the profession after being “told to look for other employment” if they could not handle teaching full classes.

Many schools now employ unqualified “cover supervisors” instead of supply teachers, but an ATL survey published earlier this month found that 53 per cent of such staff said they saw no difference between their duties and those of supplies.

And Norfolk delegate Peter Milliken said staff employed to assist disabled teachers as part of access-to-work schemes were expected to assist pupils. “This should not be a given right of schools to free labour,” he said.