Wednesday, April 15, 2009
‘I 8 Skool’ by ‘Mr Read’ £8.99 To order the book contact MrRead1@aol.com
Book Outline
1. Introduction
Why teach? Why not teach?
Autumn
2. Gulls regurgitating fish
How the training is organised by ‘consultants’, we’re marked down as an “intensive support” school. I feel like walking out.
How the training is organised by ‘consultants’, we’re marked down as an “intensive support” school. I feel like walking out.
3. WLTM GSOH TLC
I inherit a classroom from another teacher and find drawers full of unmentionable things…
4. The Line in the Sand
Reality hits me like a Kirkby Kiss, tests every six weeks, will I be the only one to speak out?
5. The Silence of the Lambs
I am the only one to speak out. How can people stay silent, or worse still agree with tests every six weeks?
6. Has anyone got an INTELLIGENT question?
Some of the strange visitors we get - Mr Crabtree with his wildlife slides, Mr Cuddles who barely got out alive.
7. Creativity and the advance stages of narcolepsy
More creativity in lessons, but… we have to fill in reams of paper to prove it.
8. Health Fascism
I’m all in favour of healthy eating and hate McDonald’s, but banning sweets?
9. Teacher training and the class from hell
Why do student teachers carry round such large files, what the hell are we trying to produce robots or teachers?
10. School Newsletters
Chavs v Posh
11. Extracting the Bodily Fluids
A premiership football club organises some after school activities for our ‘gifted and talented’. They want teachers to attend – without pay!
12. Better Grammar
How to bore children to death from an early age.
13. Unity is strength?
Why are unions so weak and ineffectual?
14. My child is a genius…
Parents’ evening.
15. Speaking VERY LOUDLY
Why is our country so crap at languages? Should we teach it in primary schools?
16. Inspector Read Investigates
When Peter’s ball goes missing I’m forced to turn detective, but D.C. Smith gets a confession…
17. Mr Motivator
Why is training so useless?
18. The aroma of aftershave
A new literacy consultant with a ‘fresh approach’ doesn’t manage to hack it.
19. Where is the Roman soldier?
Where would primary schools be without the Christmas play?
Spring
20. I’m a celebrity
Some of the teachers who could appear.
21. Mimicking silly walks
The General Teaching Council. The organisation that is there to register and discipline teachers. It only makes headlines when teachers are sacked – cue tabloid headlines ‘Teacher Found Drunk in Charge’.
22. Trusting teachers
How observations of lessons are killing teaching – micro targets for each lesson.
23. Writing with Stephen King
A good lesson using Stephen King’s book ‘How To Write’ the detective stories we produce.
24. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
Some of the grants, awards, schemes and fellowships I’ve managed to use to keep me sane.
25. The special education needs panel
They refuse a statement for one of our children, how the system is failing SEN children.
26. Cause related marketing
Tesco and other vouchers, why I hate collecting them, cutting them out and all the free publicity.
27. Dear Dairy
I organise a lesson about Anne Frank based on my visit to Amsterdam. All the children get a well-designed booklet to write in…Dear Dairy. Taxi!
28. Losing the will to live
Another ‘initiative’ is changed.
29. Take me to your subject leader
New proposals for ‘subject leaders’ and a file with 25 different items to file.
30. The SEF
The School Evaluation Form or management gobbledygook.
31. Zen and the art of play ground duty
The job that most teachers can begin to hate, yes it’s Saving Private Ryan again as chaos reigns.
32. Dame Edna and Madge
An Ofsted inspector takes the PE training day with her silent friend.
33. Hightown Park
Our local secondary school in special measures for 4 years, as part of my MA I interview the teachers.
34. The Morecambe and Wise dance
Why do so few people apply to become headteachers?
35. It’s ‘ot
Dean doesn’t remember much about the Egyptians.
36. Oversold and underused
Why ICT is not an each way bet, the book that all ICT teachers should read.
37. Morsels for Godzilla
Ofsted due another visit soon – the ‘light touch’?
38. School motto
Different mottoes that schools could use or not use.
Summer
39. I have a dream…
My visit to America and there are plenty of scary parallels with England.
40. White flight
Chicago and the unequal education system.
41. Blockading the streets
How testing is killing enjoyment in America, thoughts on my fortnight in America.
42. Julia Roberts and a ‘bad hair day’
We get £25,000 to make a film about Victorian times in our locality.
43. Losing my religion
Why should the Church of England that will close in 2050 (based on falling attendance figures) get millions of pounds for faith schools?
44. Stress week
Why is teaching so stressful?
45. The rolled up football programme…
We host a visit for our Irish school and visit the Beatles Museum, the Mersey Ferry and Anfield.
46. Nobody Drowned
We attend the school swimming gala, none of our children drown.
47. Brideshead Revisited
The great divide in our education system, I’m on holiday in Sedbergh looking at their sports facilities.
48. Links with secondaries
How not to do it. Why is it that there is so little contact? My scheme to involve them comes to a grinding halt. I teach a lesson and the teacher doesn’t turn up.
49. Teach what you’re interested in
The Titanic - how you can use film to interest children.
50. The inspectors call
Ofsted finally arrive.
51. Being sworn at by mega rich pop stars
Why I hate Comic Relief.
52. Is beginning to…
What school reports really mean…
53. Blackpool and the end of the pier
We visit the Tower and the brilliant circus; shame the town doesn’t match up.
54. The class of ‘97
What happened to my former pupils?
Conclusion
55. Conclusion
The solution is to trust and invest in teachers.
Labels: I 8 Skool
Monday, April 06, 2009
SATs BoycottThe joint call for a boycott by the largest teachers’ union (National Union of Teachers) and the main headteachers organisation (National Association of Headteachers) represents the most credible threat to the Key Stage 2 tests.
Almost every educational organisation and academic, across the political spectrum, has called for changes, if not outright abolition, of testing and league tables. Reports, enquiries and research papers must be straining every shelf in the misnamed Department for Children Schools and Families.
Last year Unicef reported on international comparisons of children’s welfare. Out of the twenty-one wealthiest industrialised countries the UK came bottom. Other studies have shown how children’s self-esteem is now linked to their academic ability. Scotland has never used SATs testing at 11 and Wales abandoned them in 2005. After last year’s marking fiasco the Key Stage 3 SATs in England were scrapped.
And yet, and yet, reasoned argument has failed, the government still clings on to Key Stage 2 SATs. There’s been so many letters written, calling for abolition that if quills were still in use every available bird would be denuded of feathers. The government’s response is always ‘standards’, this, despite the fact that when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) remarked a sample of Key Stage 2 SATs papers, 22% of the English grades were incorrect.
So there it is, unpopular tests that are unfair and completely inaccurate.
The boycott call by the NUT and NAHT is a reprise of the NUT’s campaign in 2003. However, the problem then was, what did they mean by a ‘boycott’, who would be responsible for it, what would the action comprise of? Already there is the danger that it will be mired in legal technicalities, Phil Revell, chief executive of the National Governors’ Association has warned headteachers that any boycott might lead to disciplinary action.
A boycott could lean heavily on headteachers and the Year 6 teachers, who are usually members of senior management. The campaign should involve all members of staff in primary schools; personally I’d like to see a strike on one or more days during the SATs week. That way it would be a collective decision by all teachers to boycott testing, it wouldn’t isolate a few members of staff.
80% of primary heads are members of the NAHT. I’m sure there are older heads who can remember times, if not the Elysian Fields or a millenarian golden age, when children weren’t tested to destruction and phoney league tables weren’t used to judge schools. As retirement beckons there’s many who will be saying ‘sod it, let’s scrap the tests’. As for younger heads? They will be graduates of the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) this is the course that ensures schools are run by cloned, dull, conformist, automatons.
Local authorities employ teams of School Improvement Officers who constantly ‘monitor’ schools, any ‘under-performing’ heads are liable to get the Alan Sugar treatment. So just how many of them will be willing to participate in a SATs boycott and commit career suicide?
To its credit the NUT has led the campaign to abolish SATs. The only reason the ballot failed in 2003 was that the turn out was only 34%. It is though one thing to pass a conference resolution and another thing to get the members to participate. Most primary schools don’t have a union representative and many of the union branches are moribund. Before last year’s strike I visited some of our local schools, in some the reps had done a good job and the school was closed, in another the union posters were on the staffroom notice board but this was because a diligent school secretary opened the post and made sure they were displayed. In others I rang the intercom and asked to speak to the union rep, ‘we don’t have one’, could I speak to any union member, it was about the strike. After a few minutes the door would open slightly, enough to reveal one eye, a reluctant hand would appear, grasp the leaflets, hand and eye would retreat, door closed.
The National Association of Schoolteachers (NAS) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) have, a year before it is muted, condemned the boycott call. This must take the proverbial, stale, mouldy staffroom biscuit. As part of the government’s ‘social partnership’ the two unions have signed agreements that replaced Management Allowances (MAs) with Teaching and Learning Responsibilities (TLRs) thereby reducing the pay of thousands of teachers; introduced performance management criteria that allow maverick heads to use our old friend test results to limit teachers movement up the pay scales; allowed teaching assistants to replace teachers in front of the class and when the government wanted to change teachers’ pensions in 2004, every union was calling for strike action, apart from the NAS, only a rare conference revolt brought them into line.
Just to look at TLRs in more detail, the old Management Allowances gave extra money to teachers involved in things like pastoral care, the new TLRs only provided extra cash for work involved with increased test scores. In about 100 schools where the union(s) were strong there was strike action by the NUT and or the NAS. ‘Look we are a union! We organise strikes!’ Well, even the state controlled unions in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia organised the odd strike, if they hadn’t they would have lost all credibility. The NAS signed the national agreement that replaced MAs with TLRs, despite the rearguard action in few schools, that did in the main win concessions, nationally, according to the School Teachers’ Review Body, 30,000 teachers lost pay. The NUT as usual talked a good fight, but refused to organise national action.
The NUT/NAHT SATs boycott is a ray of hope. One of the NAHT leaders described the SATs tests as, ‘child abuse’. I don’t believe that was hyperbole. Thousands of children leave primary school as ‘Level 3’s’ saying ‘I’m thick’.
We also need to get the support of parents. What about an alternative vision for Year 6?
· Learn a foreign language
· Improve the link with secondary schools for Year 7
· Write a short story
· Learn to play a musical instrument
· Go on an adventure holiday
· Put on a play
· Undertake a community project
Labels: heads, Testing, Unions
