Wednesday, September 05, 2007
‘We’ll teach when the school is ready’ The builders faithfully promised us that everything would be ready for the start of the new school year…
Luckily we had a training day organised on the first day back, we arrived to be greeted by a car park full of rubble, the kitchen half-finished and the hall full of junk, everything covered in a thick layer of dust.
A few years ago my children’s school had building work over the summer holidays and was in a right mess on the day they were due to start back. The teachers all sat in the Staffroom and the attitude was ‘we’ll teach when the school is ready’.
I’ve no time for that then or now. My golden rule for education is – ‘the children come first’. So we spent ages humping furniture around, washing down surfaces, throwing rubbish in the skip, moving paint tins, hovering down every surface and object imaginable, blocking up mice holes, mopping up leaking water from pipes. OK, it’s ‘not in the contract’, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. Miraculously the school was ready for the children to start the next day.
Labels: Work
Thursday, July 05, 2007
The BluesI know it’s getting near the end of term… it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks and I’ve just started reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ (A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind) the start of ‘doom lit’; the cat’s gone to the vets again (he routinely gets beat up by the other cats and his face has swelled up with an abscess, yes, we have got pet insurance and they only pay out when the bill is more than £50), but I’ve really got the ‘What-The-Hell-Am-I-Doing-In-Teaching-Who-The-Hell-Invented-All-This-Useless-Useless-Planning… Blues’
The staff meeting was on the new ‘Standards Planning Framework’ for literacy and maths. At a recent meeting for coordinators the local authority consultants gave out the message, ‘It’s Compulsory! You Have To Do It! No Exceptions! No Excuses!’
We dutifully trawled through the web site with reams of objectives, targets and assessments. For anyone who didn’t have Doctor Spock’s ability in speed-reading, it would take hours to plough through it all.
Who exactly is planning for? Consultants? Ofsted? Certainly not teachers or children. Time spent on detailed, irrelevant planning is time that could be spent preparing an interesting lesson or reading books.
The grey bureaucrats at the DfES probably believe that creativity and imagination is something that can be achieved by measured, incremental steps, all directed by them from their office in Central London.
Writing results at Key Stage 2 are still way behind government targets. Why can’t children write well? There are all kinds of complex reasons, partly to do with cultural questions and the influence of television and videos. But one truism is that a ‘good reader is a good writer’ (I’d qualify that – an engaged, interested, questioning reader is a good writer, too many children are good mechanical readers, they can decode text). Get them reading good books and not the scraps of text doled out by the ‘Literacy Strategy’ - today children we’re looking at this boring, turgid piece that I’ve been instructed to teach you.
We really have become mere technicians mindlessly regurgitating this dull, prescriptive curriculum overloaded with targets, levels and tests.
In September we’ve got two days training on ‘Planning Using The New Frameworks’. I’m breathless with excitement.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
‘Do One!’I love writing, but school reports really are a chore. You try to avoid any controversy, trim, use terminological inexactitudes, resort to eduspeak and employ the services of ‘Copy and Paste’. Finally I’ve finished. Phew!
In the English and Maths sections we had to write whether the children were above, at or below ‘national standards’. At the staff meeting there was talk about the ‘grid from the consultants’. Anything from these androids I normally bin or file away at the bottom of a pile of papers, just in case I might need it for the purposes of self-preservation.
Digging it out from underneath all the other junk about planning, standards, unit plans, spare socks, paracetamol, pliers (here’s an interesting thought get teachers to empty their bags and would you find anything to inspire children? I’m as guilty as the rest), it prescribed a ‘Range of Abilities’ for report writing for all years – Below, Average, High.
At the end of Year 6 the average was 4B, not just 4C, but 4B, another case of the consultants ‘raising the bar’. At the end of Year 4 the expectation was 3B. Now I know that my 3Cs will all get Level 4 but under this crazy system I’d have to say they were ‘below national expectations’.
So there we have it, the consultants are now telling us what to put in our reports. Maybe we should e-mail them our test results and they can churn out reports on a computer and mail them out to parents.
I’m not changing my reports. The consultants? As they say in Liverpool, ‘Do One!’
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Any happy primary school teachers out there?This discussion on the TES Staffroom just about sums up the situation concerning morale in primary schools. Some teachers are slogging their guts out and wanting out, others still love the job and are full of praise for their head teachers.
The post was started by –
‘Atomicpogcox’
Complaining about working 65 hours a week, with fortnightly work scrutinies in a school that is just out of special measures.
‘Deep Thought’
Also works 65 hours a week and has been off school for three weeks, two with ‘flu and one due to stress.
‘Huish’
Teaches in a school with a high staff turnover, finds the paper work exhausting and wouldn’t go into teaching if she had her time again.
‘Becomindisillusioned’
Had a new headteacher that the staff liked, but four terms in the school was put into special measures. There are continual observations from the Local Authority, they’ve lost a third of the children and still don’t have a permanent head or deputy.
By contrast…
‘Nutella’
Has been teaching for thirty years and has loved every minute of it.
‘Missnomer’
Has taught for 17 years and loves the job, bins the unnecessary, knows when to say no and won’t back down.
‘Boat-to-bolivia’
Calls on teachers to have faith in themselves and that the best part of the job is the kids.
‘Fmath’
Is an NQT who has taught for two terms, has supportive colleagues and goes tap dancing twice a week.
‘Wolverina’
Has a head that is HUMAN and believes that good leadership is the key.
On that last point the head teacher in primary can make or break a school. However, when I visited Germany there was a much more collegiate tradition. The head taught a class and was allowed some time for admin, but she was very much part of the teaching team. Decisions about the school were taken at the staff meetings and it wasn’t unknown for the head to be in a minority. In England many head teachers consider it to be “their” school.
It would certainly take a courageous or even foolish head to swim against the current tide. SATs and league tables are everything, that’s all that Ofsted are really interested in. Most head teachers are chained and bound hand and feet to the testing juggernaut. Why do so few teachers want to become heads?
Paper work has become the bane of teacher’s lives. My advice is – Keep it to the Minimum. What is planning for? It should be a working document that you can actually use in the lessons not some kind of ‘War and Peace’ document that is completely unintelligible and verbose. What matters most is preparing interesting lessons.
Special measures are a living hell (thankfully it only affects a small percentage of schools, there but for the grace…) but the Ofsted culture affects every school. In particular there is the culture of failure, my advice is - don’t internalise failure, no one should be expected to work 65 hours a week. Some NQTs have the youth and energy to cope, the problem is that when they start a family they can’t do it.
The other side of the coin is the ‘super-teacher’ syndrome, this is reinforced by the Teacher Training Institutions where the expectation is that you will be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, working an 80-hour week and filling every form out in triplicate. In most jobs it takes you 5 or 6 years before you really understand what and how to do it. We seem to expect that student teachers will fly as soon as they leave the nest.
How have I survived? By doing projects with the children that have interested them and me. ‘What’s in it for the children?’ Is always my first question.
The best advice comes from ‘shell43’ and this should be given to every NQT and posted up in every staffroom in the land – ‘FORGET ALL THE CRAP AND ENJOY THE CHILDREN YOU TEACH’.
Labels: Work
Monday, April 09, 2007
Unity is Strength – 2The Times Educational Supplement provide an invaluable service with their Internet Staffroom (the General Teaching Council tried and failed with their ‘Discussion Forums’ and the NUT web site contains loads of boring circulars and messages from the General Secretary, but nothing from the membership), it’s just that some of the posts don’t exactly add to the advancement of human understanding. There’s personal abuse, persistent posters on irrelevant issues (some of them really do need to get out more) and then there’s ‘I went to Lidl’ by ‘Mr Smallcock’.
However, ‘astaire’ (post 17) has written a cogent reply to my article and other pieces on the teacher unions. Here’s the post in full-
‘It would be a good idea to have ONE teacher union, and a good start would be for ALL the teacher unions to meet and set course for change by AGREEING on something that ALL can go along with.
However, just around the year 2000, ALL the teacher unions met to agree to something, but after prolonged (and joint) talks ONE union decided to pull out (for reasons other than the published ones).
This was the workload agreement. And it is a crucial agreement.
It is at that point I decided that there is merit in having separate and different philosophies within teaching, and NO teacher union to have overall say in how the future of the profession is decided.
Despite a knowledgeable blog by "Mr Read", many of his claims are false. As a example "there is only one teachers union in Ireland". Actually there are six or seven, including TUI, INTO, ASTI, UTU, as well as NAS and ATL!
ATL does not "organise mainly in the Independent sector". ATL has the largest number of Independent sector members, but it's bulk is mainly in the state sector, and FE (160,000 plus members).
Whilst it is true that all pay claims for teachers are submitted to the STRB, Mr Read forgets to state that ALL pay claims and conditions of service submissions from the "social partnership" (which is ALL teacher unions except the NUT), include those of the government and the employers. They therefore have a chance of succeeding, unlike the outlandish claims which have been a feature of the NUT submissions of the last few years.
Diversity within teacher unions have been a feature of the world wide teacher situation more longer than most think and schisms have also been a common feature. Without such occurances, how much do you think your fees would be for being in a union? I would estimate they would at least double. And if there is only one union who would you go to if the union decided on a course which you don't like?
In Scotland the largest "union" is not a "union" at all! EIS is an "Institution" and as such it's "general secretary" is not subject to re-election every five years as every "union" must do. And there is a sizeable number of the teaching population in one of several other unions, including SSTA, NAS, ATL, PAT, representing around 25% of all the teachers in that country. In Wales the largest teachers union is NAS, closely followed by ATL, and there are of course a smallish number (by comparison) in UCAC. America has two large teacher unions. Most of the European countries have two or more.
Nevertheless I agree that ALL unions should UNITE in common action. The trouble is that ONE of those unions does not want to go the way the rest of the unions want to go. Ergo, disunion right from the start.
And as for "snouts in the trough". Has the person who posted THAT one got knowledge of the way unions operate which is different than mine? What trough? A look at any set of teacher union accounts (published and audited every year), will show a fine operating margin, due to having to keep fees down or cut fees in order to attract members from other unions.
And as for the comment on total fees for a lifetime of £6,000. Is it as little as that? How much for your car insurance then, for thirty years? Or your house insurance? Why not do away with paying house insurance? Just think of what you could save!
Additionally the person who said that would have to remind me of how "cheap" an employment lawyer would be should you need one. At around £200-300 per hour, for advice, plus £3,000 per day for representation in tribunal. Soon eats up £6,000 does it not?
Working together teacher unions could achieve a great deal. The trouble is that not all of them have this idea at the forefront of their minds. Not by any means! And that goes for teachers as well!
Finally there is the "at least with the NUT we were not "sold down the river". How? Has their stance changed anything? Hove they given value for money by NOT taking part in ANY meaningful negotiations for nearly five years? Just WHO has "sold" WHO "down the river" here?’
Firstly, ‘only one teaching union in Ireland’? Yes, wrong. In fact all primary teachers belong to the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), secondary teachers are members of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) and the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI). To my knowledge none of the British based unions have any significant membership in the Republic. It is more complicated in Northern Ireland because both British and Irish based unions organise there, as well as local unions like the Ulster Teachers’ Union (UTU).
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers does have 160,000 members in both schools and further education colleges. However, I can’t find the percentage that is employed in the independent sector, maybe someone else could help here?
My point about the unions not directly negotiating on pay is valid, even more so as the government have ‘instructed’ the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) that pay rises for 2008 – 2011 should not go beyond 2%.
The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) may have described itself as an “Institution” in order to escape Tory anti-union laws but in all but name it is a union (the EIS is affiliated to the TUC and STUC). I don’t know how effective the EIS is as a union, it’s probably more due to the different political landscape but they don’t have Ofsted, the national curriculum, SATs tests or league tables. Some of the reasons why teachers are queuing to cross the border?
The workload agreement? What have we gained exactly? The NAS traded PPA time for primary teachers; in return schools were able to use teaching assistants to cover classes. An ATL survey, reported in this week’s TES, found more than a third were only paid higher rates when they covered a class (in some cases an extra 15p an hour) and nearly 60% did not have a clear system of supervision to support them or a defined job description. The workload agreement has also delivered the joys of ‘Payment by Results’.
The NAS really has become the government poodle, they refused to support the NUT campaign for increased London Weighting, didn’t want to join the NUT action against SATs and two years ago (until the leadership were overthrown by a rare conference revolt) were the only union not threatening action over cuts in pension entitlements. Union? A good case to answer for under the Trades Description Act?
‘Astaire’ is right that diversity within teacher unions is a common worldwide feature. In France and Italy there are several teacher unions, however, pressure from the membership forces them to act together and unite in common action.
Another correspondent accuses the NUT of being ‘strike, strike, strike’. Obviously they haven’t been to the NUT Conference because the leadership spend most of their time opposing action – ‘too early’ or ‘too late’ – and even if a resolution is passed they promise to ignore it any way.
The only valid point is that it isn’t just about passing Conference resolutions, you have to win the membership over as well. Strikes in the public sector also need public support, this is something that the NUT lost sight of in the 1980s with one-day guerrilla ‘no notice’ strikes that lost parental sympathy.
Faced with a neo-liberal Blair government the unions hopes of social partnership have been dashed, from academies to support for Ofsted, testing and league tables, you could put a cigarette paper between their policies and the Conservatives. The main problem is that unions are weak and ineffectual in this country. The government tries to rob the low paid public sector workers of their pensions – we have apologetic strikes. The French try some minor changes in employment laws and everyone walks out on strike. Unions are there for collective action not just as insurance associations, that’s why the Friendly Societies declined.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
We’re Happy And We Know It?That’s it then. According to the latest Times Educational Supplement survey we’re all deliriously happy. Well not quite.
The online survey asked teachers to rate their well being and contentment on a scale of 1 to 10. 73% rated themselves as a six or above, with 26% placing themselves at level eight. There was a clear divided between secondary and primary – 57% thought they worked in a happy school, compared to 70%. A full 92% of head teachers thought they commanded a happy ship, no surprise there because even if the crew are on the verge of mutiny most head teachers sail on blissfully unaware of the impending crisis, “you mean there were weevils in the bread?” 67% were happier than they were ten years ago, but then when you’ve experienced absolute zero anything will feel warmer.
As with any survey there are some notes of caution, the poll results were based on only 500 replies and maybe there’s a suspicion that readers of the TES are more likely to view teaching in a positive light, others just want to escape from teaching at weekends.
The General Teaching Council carried out the largest survey on teacher morale in 2002 – over 70,000 responded. The key findings were-
· One in three teachers expected to leave within five years
· 56% said their morale was lower than when they started teaching
· One third would not go into teaching if they had their time again
It’s probably hard to define what you mean by “happiness”, if you asked Prince Charles you’d get a Delphic and elliptical reply. Just as work can make you unhappy so can chronic under-employment, symptoms – talking to plants, writing letters in green ink to ‘important people’ and trying to sell over-priced biscuits.
Some teachers can sit in a staff meeting with a serene smile and say nothing as a proposal to test children every six weeks sails through. That left me raging for weeks (see previous posts ‘The Line in the Sand’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’) and I’ve boycotted the staff room ever since.
The timing of any survey would be another key factor, the most depressing day in the year is the fourth Monday in January, it’s perpetually dark, wet playtimes children cooped up all day, paying off those Christmas bills. Come July the sun is shining, there’s the prospect of the long summer break and a new class to look forward to in September.
Teaching does have its fair share of moaners, usually men of a certain age with an elbows patch mentality, favourite phrases – ‘We’ve always done it like that’, ‘I’ve been here xxxx years’ and ‘Nobody told me about that’. My iron law of moaners is that whenever it comes to speaking out at staff meetings they suddenly become mute and if there is ever a ballot for action over something they don’t bother, ‘It won’t change anything anyway’.
We’re not helped by books on teaching they tend to fall into the ‘misery lit’ category – The Ranting Teacher’s ‘Everything You Need to Know to Survive Teaching’, Francis Gilbert’s ‘I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here!’ and Frank Chalk’s ‘It’s Your Time You’re Wasting’. The premise of all these books is that teachers’ enemies are pupils, parents and senior management – in that order. The problem with ‘view from the trenches’ books is that they never ask the question why war started in the first place. The prognosis is always unremittingly bleak, with desertion the only option.
I tried to write something different with ‘How Not To Teach’ there’s plenty of gallows humour but I also included some of the best things I’ve accomplished with the children, the film we made, the trips to Ireland and London. The other side of the equation however, is the Panglossian world projected in magazines like the DfES’s ‘Teacher’, where there are glowing articles featuring the kind of teachers who really believe that everyone should be working a sixteen hour day.
Longitudinal surveys on morale amongst public sector workers (Andrew Oswald’s) have shown a significant decline over the last twenty years. There’s also the continual haemorrhage of newly qualified teachers – up to half leave within the first five years.
Am I happy? Ask me at the end of July.
Labels: Work
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Unity is Strength?For people of my generation trade unions belonged to our cultural experience – there was the Boulting Brothers ‘I’m Alright Jack’ (I’ve known a few Fred Kites myself), The Strawbs ‘Part of the Union’ and TUC General Secretaries as household names. Brendan who?
Teaching is now the exception, because well over 90% of the profession are members of a trade union. But despite that exactly how effective are they? Why do they let Ofsted harass teachers, why are there such long working hours and why do teachers have such little control over what they teach? Unions don’t even directly negotiate on pay, they make submissions to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB) which then makes a recommendation to the government. In the recent British Social Attitudes survey only a third of all trade unionists thought they got good value for money from their membership.
Over the last decades we have witnessed their declining strength. Any union that sanctions ‘illegal’ strikes is liable to suffer crippling fines and solidarity action is outlawed. Part of the explanation lies in the destruction of old smoke stack industries, which were a strong hold for trade unionism. From a high point of 12 million in the 1970s, there are now only 6 million members. Membership tends to be concentrated in certain sectors and regions. If you are an older male, full-time worker in the public sector from the North East there is an extremely high likelihood that you will be in a union. If you are a younger female part time worker in the private sector in the South East, there is only a 5% chance that you will be a trade unionist.
Given this bleak background trade unions have begun to huddle together for warmth, mergers between unions is the latest survival technique. Most public sector unions have merged into Unison and if the T&G and Amicus combine that will take care of most private sector workers. In the era of the super-unions disunity amongst teachers provokes the call for ‘One Union’. In Ireland all teachers, including heads, belong to the same union. A few years ago the government attempted to impose a new science scheme on schools, the booklets were left unopened in the schools’ offices and the training courses were empty. Eventually the government had to retreat.
Teachers have three medium sized ineffectual unions to choose from and then there’s the smaller no-strike Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) with its eccentric conference resolutions, no losers but “deferred success” and dogs as classroom assistants. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has a reputation for ‘militancy’ despite the fact that the last national strikes were in the 1980s; the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) mainly organises in the independent sector; lastly there’s the National Association of Schoolteachers (NAS) which emerged as a split from the NUT in the 1920s due to their opposition to equal pay for female teachers, in the 1960s they were still championing corporal punishment in schools. Recently they have been the most prominent converts to the ‘National Agreement’ that sanctioned the use of classroom assistants to cover classes. Would one large, undemocratic, ineffectual union that is a government patsy make any difference?
Whatever happened to the unions? During the 1990s ‘credit card unionism’ made its appearance, the theory was that all members needed and wanted was cheap finance and legal advice. Out went the school rep, the union branch and the national conference, the only relationship was between the member and the head quarters. The NUT magazine is a good example of this trend, the 48 pages are chock full of finance adverts, legal advice, stories about the General Secretary, but anything from ordinary teachers? One page of letters and a few brief pieces by teachers in ‘Chalk and Talk’.
Branch secretaries and full time officials spend most of their time on case work (as important as they are to the individuals concerned) but they are fighting the symptoms not the causes. How to stop stress amongst teachers? A good start would be scrapping Ofsted and stopping the testing culture. Like all compensation agents unions cherry pick the best cases to fight.
Union structures have withered on the vine, the last three national ballots in the NUT – SATs, the general secretary election and workload – all had turnouts of around 20%, or to put it another way 80% of the membership didn’t vote. The NUT national executive has 27 members, but only 9 of them faced a contested election. Many schools don’t have union reps, or just someone who ‘opens the post’. Branches struggle to find officers and are often inquorate. The national conferences are heavy on procedure, guest speakers, reports and stage-managed debates.
The NUT conference has a reputation for being feisty when addressed by government ministers. It’s interesting how teachers have become demonised by these set piece events, compare for instance the booing that Jack Straw received from the ‘Bobbies’ at the Police Federation Conference or the slow hand clapping that Tony Blair got at the Women’s Institute National Meeting – all a jolly jape of course. Somehow at the NUT conference when faced by a bunch of teachers (let’s be honest, most of us couldn’t punch our way out of a wet paper bag) the politicians all turn into wilting violets. Mind you if someone was invited to my party and turned round and said that my family and me were all a useless pile of excrement, I think I’d give them a hard time.
Hundreds of union reps and branch officers still do a fantastic job – in their own time. The recent strikes against cuts in the new TLR scales showed that there’s life in the old dog yet. Where would we be if there weren’t unions to defend us? Trade unions are still popular with the wider public. The teaching unions have managed to steer well clear from the corruption scandals in America that have blighted them (Miami teachers’ union leader Pat Tornillo was jailed in 2003 for embezzling millions of dollars from union funds).
The theory under pinning credit card trade unionism was that you had to service the individual’s needs, collective action was outdated and solidarity belonged to another century. But individualism cuts both ways, what happens when teachers do the maths? In a teaching career you might spend £6k on union fees. Value for money? I’ve never found union sponsored financial deals to be cheaper and with such a heavy caseload, if you do have a problem, will it get the attention it deserves? Why not save the money and if necessary hire your own employment lawyer?
The other problem is that people ask, “What is the union doing?” As though the union is some kind of autonomous, external entity that can intervene on people’s behalf. My reply is always, “you are the union”. Maybe we should be asking not ‘what can the union do for me, but what can I do for the union?’ Let’s also remember that in history (before unions were even invented) every revolt began with someone saying that simple word, ‘No’.
The first plain truth is that teachers get a spectacularly bad deal from their unions, in case any union spokesman deigns to reply maybe they could address the following score card – Ofsted, long hours, workload, low pay (for a graduate profession), payment by results, the testing culture and teachers queuing up to leave.
The second plain truth is that we need effective unions like we have never needed them before. The raison d’être of the first trade unions was that one worker on their own was powerless, only when they combined together were they listened to – ‘Unity is Strength’.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Take Me To Your Subject Leader…Regular readers of this blog might remember a previous post – ‘The Sheer Futility of Human Existence’, when we heard at the staff meeting how co-ordinators in primary schools had been replaced by ‘Subject Leaders’ who would drive everything mercilessly forward with ‘vision’.
Central to their task would be preparing a mazzy big file with a Job Description, Vision Statement for your School/Subject, Subject Policy, Subject Development Plan/ Action Plan, Annual Maintenance Schedule, Subject Scheme of Work, Examples of Planning (medium or short term), Assessments, Marking Policy, Tests, Some examples of assessed work, Examples/Reports of monitoring activities, Monitoring Schedule, Schedule for Staff meetings where Subject is on agenda, Relevant Minutes of above meetings, Schedules for SMT Subject Management Meetings, Reports to the Governors, Minutes of above meetings, Subject Evaluations and reviews including last OfSTED, Copies of monitoring feedback to teachers, Budget Information, List of resources and Purchases, CPD Log for Courses, Activity Log For Subject Leader and Pictures of La La and Twinky Winky. OK, I did make the last bit up, but I’m sure you get the point.
However, I’m reliably informed that particularly if you are expected to ‘manage’ other staff then you are entitled to a Teaching and Learning Responsibility (TLR) payment. The relevant paragraph is from the Frequently Asked Questions in the ‘Rewards and Incentives Group’. In question 41A they state,
‘In cases where responsibilities exceed or lie outside these parameters (for example, where the co-ordination of subjects across the curriculum entails leading and managing other teachers), it would not be reasonable for teachers to undertake them without additional remuneration. It would then be for the school to determine whether such responsibilities/posts of responsibility meet the criterion and the factors for the award of a TLR payment or whether they would better be undertaken by an AST, an Excellent Teacher or a member of the leadership group.’
I won’t quote the full answer for reasons of brevity and also whenever I start reading official documents it induces a state of catatonic stupor.
What is clear – Subject Leader = payment = even then avoid it like the plague – give it to management.
Labels: Work
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Nil by teachersWhat do ‘Primary Teachers’ (funded by the DfES), the General Teaching Council’s magazine and the union journals all have in common? Apart from being glossy all colour productions with snazzy design and catchy headlines, there’s virtually nothing in them from… teachers. Professional journalists write everything.
‘Primary Teachers’ contains 36 pages, as a concession the last two pages are given over to classroom resources, classroom capers, answers please and ‘I’m a teacher and a…’ (don’t answer that).
I’m not suggesting that it should be filled with articles by teachers moaning, but a certain sense of reality would help. Also why not try to inspire us?
‘Primary Teachers’ really is the ‘Truman Show’ of magazines, we all live in this permanently sunny, smiley world where happy and contented teachers work in bright, freshly painted schools with manicured lawns and white picket fences. Naturally they didn’t want to disturb the inhabitants by commenting on the Unicef report (most miserable children).
How could I sum up ‘Primary Teachers’ in three words? Trite, insubstantial and patronising.
Labels: Work
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The Full Frontal LobotomyTwo years ago I went on a five day Key Stage 2 Maths course. If you ever get the chance to go on one – DO NOT ATTEND – feign illness, find an excuse, pretend you forgot the dates. It was five days of excruciating mind-numbing tedium. The default mode was – ‘we know you’re useless, we’ll talk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Here’s how to do it, no discussion.’ Everything was from a DfES manual, the trainers had done it twenty times before so they were bored out of their skulls as well.
One of the new schemes piloted was the detailed daily maths plan, the lessons all done for you – mental oral starters, worksheets and plenaries. When I say detailed I mean detailed, the problem was that to actually use them as a working document you’d either need a photographic memory or read the entire lesson out direct from the plan.
The LEA Numeracy Consultants toured the schools enforcing the implementation of the daily maths plans. I was the only one out of the staff to oppose it – too prescriptive, didn’t allow for the needs of the particular class, lack of differentiation, and didn’t give time for consolidation of knowledge. But ‘for Ofsted’ and to grind out better SATs results we had to carry out ‘the daily maths plan’.
Students of the history of Stalinism will be aware of the various twists and turns performed by the Communist International. In 1929 the collapse of capitalism (the so-called ‘Third Period’) was declared, breakaway trade unions were formed, in Germany they branded the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ and refused to work with them against the Nazis. In 1935 there was a new turn – ‘Popular Frontism’ –every group was urged to ‘unite’ against fascism. However this came to a grinding halt with the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the war was described as ‘imperialist’ and Communists in Britain took a neutralist stance. After the invasion of Russia in 1941 another turn - the ‘People’s Front’ against the Nazis.
Every u-turn was transmitted through the Central Committee, District Committees and branches, with the party apparatchiks and paid full timers faithfully spouting the ‘new line’ as soon as it was formulated.
At last week’s staff meeting there was a report on the maths co-ordinators meeting, the regional maths consultant had slated the daily maths plans for, ahem, being ‘too prescriptive, not allowing for the needs of the particular class, lacking differentiation and not giving time for consolidation of knowledge.’ The LEA consultants all instantly and obediently fell into line.
The same process has happened with the detailed plans for the Literacy Strategy, which have been expunged from the DfES ‘Standards’ web site in favour of the lighter touch Literacy Framework. Another echo of Stalinism, any former stalwarts of the regime who disappeared during the purges were airbrushed from history.
Why did Stalinism collapse? One reason was the complete lack of innovation and critical thought, the stultification of art and culture. The system was so centralised that no one lower down the command chain wanted to take a decision for fear of reprisals. It lead to stasis and paralysis.
At the staff meeting no one seemed to remember the previous discussions on the daily maths plans. Maybe the Teachers Development Agency could add this affliction to their 97 competencies for teachers –
· Ability to plan lessons in minute boring detail
· Monitoring, assessing and recording every single piece of work
· Plastering the classroom with targets
· Testing children to death
· Full frontal lobotomy to erase any memory
Don’t even mention the gulag of the mind – we’re already there.
Labels: Work
Monday, March 12, 2007
Still Grim – Recovery Will Take Twenty Years!Government funded research has shown that after decades of decline teachers believe their lot is improving – marginally.
Researchers found that workload reduction and increased spending has helped to improve morale. However, they warned that it could be another twenty years before teaching becomes a “high status” job.
Parents, governors and teaching assistants (associated groups) were asked with teachers to rank the profession on a five-point scale from very low (one) to very high (five). In 1967 the ratings were 4.4 for the associated group and 4.3 for teachers (the Plowden golden age?).
By 2003 the figures had fallen to 2.7 and 2.2. This year’s survey showed slight improvements to 2.9 and 2.5. Although teachers still thought their job was lacking in reward and respect, with high external control and regulation.
There weren’t any figures for when New Labour came into office in 1997, that would have made an interesting comparison. What the figures did show was that in four years morale has only marginally improved from a very low level. Surprising given the miniscule increase to see the headline in the Times Educational Supplement, ‘Feelgood factor is back’. I think mine is more appropriate.
Labels: Work
Sunday, March 11, 2007
The Gradgrind’s CharterThere was a confusing blizzard of initials, the DfES (Department for Education and Science) decided on the recommendations sent to it by the STRB (School Teachers’ Review Body) on PBR (Payment By Results). Reading the proposals my heart sank they really are a ‘Gradgrind’s Charter’, but it’s the NQTs that I feel sorry for because they will have to inherit the wasteland.
What do the proposals mean?
1) Ambitious young teachers can jump some of the pay scales and get increased pay “based on results”.
2) The 240,000 senior staff will have their pay firmly tied to the treadmill of… yes, you’ve guessed it results.
3) NQTs will only move up the pay scale when they… get results.
For the 280,000 teachers on the main scale there’s a vague formulation that, “all progression on incremental pay scales follow a performance management review and that a teacher’s performance has satisfied explicit performance-related criteria.” In other words enough room for unscrupulous Heads to withhold pay increases. That government poodle the NAS promised that main scale teachers had “nothing to fear” from the proposals - so senior staff whose pay depends on results won’t be putting any pressure on, particularly for SATs and GCSE results? My name is Chris Woodhead and I claim my £10.
The NUT (which was founded in the late nineteenth century to oppose payment by results) usually talk a good fight but do nothing about it, they did a classic spin operation by reporting the progress made for part-time and supply teachers but abandoned the fight for NQTs.
Maybe when we talk about “results” we need a bit of intellectual honesty because even a brain dead chimp could “raise standards”. How do you do it? Simple, narrow down the curriculum, teach to test, constantly test children, focus on the borderline group that will make all the difference and if in doubt cheat, remembering the golden rule – don’t get caught.
In my experience 80% of children don’t have any problem with “the basics” the other 20% are the SEN children who need specialist help. The iron law of assessment is that the higher the learning skill the harder it is to assess. How do you actually measure, love of learning, innovation, creativity or imagination? Yes it’s a real bugger as soon as you try to enter them on a spreadsheet they escape like a ghost. It’s got to the stage now that whenever I hear the words ‘Multiple Choice’ I want to start screaming and head for the hills.
Exactly what sort of teacher will the payment by results proposals promote? Will it be?
Teacher A- who is creative, attempts to enthuse children with a love for learning, is well liked by his pupils and promotes cooperation between them, teaches a wide ranging and balanced curriculum, is always taking his class on trips out, inspires them with a love of reading and has colourful displays with children’s work all over the classroom walls.
Or
Teacher B – a results obsessed, joyless, utilitarian automaton who teaches a narrowed down curriculum, there’s constant testing and the SEN children are on the brink of revolt, his pupils can’t wait to get out of class and the walls are covered with targets for the pupils, class and school, after being fed a constant diet of gruel the more able children are exhibiting the first signs of malnutrition.
Of course I exaggerate for effect, or maybe not.
In all of this my constant question is - what the hell are we doing to our children? See the Unicef report for more details. The other week I was talking to a Year 6 teacher, his Head had finally thrown his hand in after attending another LEA meeting on target setting. The school’s assessments had been ripped up and the scary consultants were asking them to “push more children through the barrier”. They looked at their children in Year 6, who were they talking about? There was the shy child whose confidence was fragile because his parents had just gone through a messy divorce, there was the pupil who had wet the bed during the Year 2 tests and her parents had made it clear “never again” and then there was the boy whose parents thought was a potential genius, yes they could, with a lot of work, get him to Level 5, but for his sake didn’t want to.
Some teachers may choose to worship the devil, that’s a matter of personal choice, but it’s not for me. The proposals on payment by results really are another bleak day for education and our children, slowly, slowly, the light is being extinguished.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Stress WeekOn discovering that Teachers’ TV are running ‘Stress Week’ I didn’t know whether to squeeze a touchy-feely stress ball or run round the playground laughing manically. Instead as a piece of therapy I decided to write this article.
In a recent Teachers’ TV survey two thirds of the 823 teachers polled felt stressed by teaching, half of them during lesson – the biggest cause being disrespectful pupils.
· Three quarters felt inadequately supported by their head teacher or senior management
· Four out of ten blamed stress on poor resources in the classroom
· 44% said they were stressed due to large class sizes
‘I’m stressed out’ is used so often that it can cheapen or diminish the real meaning of the word. What is stress? Kornhauser (1965) defined it as,
“…everything that deprives the person of purpose and zest, that leaves him with negative feelings about himself, with anxieties, tensions, a sense of lostness, emptiness, and futility.”
Stress can be positive or negative, everyone needs a certain amount of stress in his or her job to improve or advance. Different individuals react in dissimilar ways to stress. A Type A personality may have excellent coping mechanisms and may be able to talk to other work mates (one of the best ways to diffuse stress). A Type B personality may bottle everything up and be unable to express their feelings.
Stress occurs at the point when the magnitude of the stress exceeds the individual’s capacity to resist. Crucially stress is a result of pressure, strain or anxiety over an extended period of time. The symptoms may include – job dissatisfaction, mental ill health, accidents, intentions to leave, absenteeism, excessive drinking and family problems.
Work is probably the most important part of our lives; in his book Working (1972) Studs Terkel commented that,
“It (work) is about a search, too, for daily meaning, as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather then torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
In Britain one of the main causes of stress is the long hours culture a Labour Force Survey in 2005 found that Britons put in 36 million hours of free overtime each year with one in three refusing to take their full holiday entitlement, fearing a backlog of work when they returned. Other key findings were –
· Four million work more than 48 hours a week on average, 700,000 more than in 1992
· Full time employees in the UK work the longest hours in Europe. The average for full timers in the UK is 43.5. In France it’s 38.2 and in Germany 39.9, yet both are more productive than the UK
· Only senior managers did more unpaid overtime than teachers
In June 2005 the UK government led a minority of other countries to block moves to end the ‘opt-out’ from the European Working Time Directive’s 48 hour ceiling on the working week.
The economist Andrew Oswald has conducted research on job satisfaction in the public sector. He found that in the early 1990s there were far higher levels of job satisfaction compared to the private sector, by the end of the decade this gap had been virtually eroded. Oswald cited pressures to meet targets and the introduction of working practices from the private sector.
In response to teacher stress the phone service ‘Teacher Support Line’ was established in September 1999, in the first 18 months fifty suicidal and clinically-depressed teachers sought counselling and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. In 2006, 6331 teachers called for advice; 36% complained about lack of support from management.
Different surveys have established that teaching is one of the most stressful jobs, in 1996 Travers and Cooper conducted one of the largest surveys into stress among teachers For graduates in general, the normative job satisfaction level was 74.6; for teachers it was only 59.6. A Health and Safety Executive report in 2001 claimed that 6.5 million days were lost every year due to stress. The most stressful job? Teaching.
The most extensive survey on morale was undertaken by the GTC in 2002 in which 70,011 teachers participated. One in three expected to leave teaching within five years in protest at the workload, government interference and poor pupil behaviour. More than half said their morale was lower than when they joined the profession and a third would not go into teaching if they had their time again.
Teachers don’t willingly admit to being under stress, in some schools it’s seen as a sign of weakness – ‘not being able to cope’ or of failure. Management stuck away in their bunkers are usually in denial about poor behaviour and NQTs often don’t receive the support and guidance they need or deserve.
The main danger with stress is that you can become emotionally detached from your job and excessive stress over extended periods of time can lead to burn-out and emotional exhaustion. The symptoms are high depersonalisation, low personal accomplishment and sickness or absenteeism.
Most LEAs have teams of officers that enforce teacher’s attendance they are very good at making anyone with a poor sickness record take early retirement. In one neighbouring school a teacher (who wasn’t a sick note) took time off after being assaulted by a pupil and faced disciplinary action on her return. It was the last straw for the staff and a threatened strike kept the LEA rottweilers at bay.
LEAs have had to take teacher stress much more seriously this came after a stunning legal victory when Alan Barber a former maths teacher from Somerset whose complaints about workload were dismissed by a, “brusque, autocratic and bullying” head was awarded £100,000 in March 2001. He had retired in 1997 on medical advice suffering from depression brought on by his “unremitting” workload of between 61 and 70 hours a week.
Lastly teachers lack of control over their job is another significant cause of stress, they have become deprofessionalised with no autonomy to think for themselves, the curriculum is prescribed by the DfES.
The Teachers’ TV Stress Week seems to be well meaning but ultimately patronising because whilst I can’t claim to have seen every programme there seemed to be a significant input from the ‘behavioural gurus’ (£500 a session nice work if you can get it). I’ve been on those courses and the not-so-subtle message is, ‘If only you weren’t such crap teachers you would be able to control your class’, this from people who have usually deserted the front line years ago.
There never seems to be any recognition that poor pupil behaviour is not the only cause of stress, there’s also the hours; workload; lack of management support; the denigration of the profession by government and media; low pay for a graduate trained career and lack of control over the curriculum. Also the very selective secondary school system doesn’t seem to be considered where we have grammar schools on one side (2% Free School Meals, 0% Special Education Needs) alongside Gasworks Comprehensive (70% FSM, 50% SEN).
I’ve e-mailed this article to Teachers’ TV and challenged them to put it on their web site, will they? Pigs might fly?
Labels: Work
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The Utter Futility of Human ExistenceThere are moments of bleak despair, times when you question the sheer utter futility of human existence and there are staff meetings. This week it was on ‘Subject Leadership’, when you are in a small primary school by the law of averages you will end up ‘Co-ordinating’ one or two subjects. The presentation was on the new thinking emanating from the DfES, it’s not just a change of name but a whole scale re-vamp, repositioning, revolution, we’re now going to be called ‘Subject Leaders’ and in this brave new world will be using ‘vision’ to drive our subjects forward.
Naturally ‘for OfSTED’ we would have to develop a comprehensive file. This was the list of possible contents for the subject leader’s file. We were assured it wasn’t an exhaustive list we could add to it if we wanted to….
Contents of Subject Leaders File
1. Job Description
2. Vision Statement for your School/Subject
3. Subject Policy
4. Subject Development Plan/ Action Plan
5. Annual Maintenance Schedule
6. Subject Scheme of Work
7. Examples of Planning (medium or short term)
8. Assessments
9. Marking Policy
10. Tests
11. Some examples of assessed work
12. Examples/Reports of monitoring activities
13. Monitoring Schedule
14. Schedule for Staff meetings where Subject is on agenda
15. Relevant Minutes of above meetings
16. Schedules for SMT Subject Management Meetings
17. Reports to the Governors
18. Minutes of above meetings
19. Subject Evaluations and reviews including last OfSTED
20. Copies of monitoring feedback to teachers
21. Budget Information
22. List of resources and Purchases
23. CPD Log for Courses
24. Activity Log For Subject Leader
25. Pictures of La La and Twinky Winky
O.K. I made the last bit up just to see if you were still awake.
Bizarre as it may seem under the circumstances but I actually decided to become a teacher because I wanted to teach children, not fill in forms to place in a file. ‘I’m A Subject Leader Get Me Out Of Here!’
Labels: Work
Sunday, January 28, 2007
The ragged trousered philanthropistWhat keeps me in teaching? Apart from the generous holidays, there is still the love and sheer joy of working with young children (honestly!). Aside from that what’s kept me interested have been the different sabbaticals, grants, fellowships, bursaries and awards that are still on offer, if you can but find them. To save you all time here’s my top ten.
But firstly in the spirit of ‘How Not to Teach’ experience has persuaded me to steer clear and avoid anything with ‘Kite’, ‘Quality’, ‘Mark’ or ‘Charter’ on it. This is usually a recipe for endless form filling and then you have to pay them for a tiny logo on your school letterhead that you would need an electron microscope to detect. Some stressed-out heads obsessively collect them as some kind of magical hex to ward off Ofsted.
Regrettably some of the best schemes have finished
· Best Practice Research Scholarships allowed teachers time out of the classroom to study an aspect of the curriculum
· DfES Challenging Schools Sabbaticals gave teachers six weeks paid leave to do something creative
It’s routine for university lecturers to take time out for paid sabbaticals to study, think, read widely and write. Most head teachers seem completely averse to any of their staff leaving school for as much as a nanosecond – shoulder to the wheel, nose to the whiteboard. The times when staff could go out for ten days of training to be a coordinator have long gone.
If you are going to apply for any awards or grants, aside from your own professional development as a teacher and pedagogue, my bottom line is always – what’s in it for the children? So see previous comments about ‘Kite’, ‘Quality’, ‘Mark’ or ‘Charter’.
1. Farmington Fellowships
The Farmington really is the blue ribbon of sabbaticals, teachers of RE can get up to a term of paid leave to research an aspect of religion, a lecturer from a local university gives you support and guidance.
An eccentric wealthy benefactor called Bobby Wills established the trust. He liked to tell the story of a formidable headmistress who sat next to him at their annual meeting, “What's your connection with the Trust?” she asked him, her eyes running over his old pullover and corduroys. “Oh, I do a bit of this and that,” came the rather diffident reply. “Can't you be a bit more specific?” she pressed, a hint of disparagement in her tone. “Well, if you must know,” he rejoined, “I'm the Trust's founder and chairman.” She didn’t believe him.
At LEA training courses the default mode from the providers is – ‘Here’s a useless bunch of miscreants and loafers we need to bore into submission with planning sheets, Schemes of Work and targets. Here’s the tablets of stone, Woodhouse has spoken’. It takes a while to get used to the Farmington method, which is to trust teachers. It’s a bit like the scene in Jimmy Boyle’s ‘A Sense of Freedom’, he’s a notorious gangster and has been through all of Scotland’s toughest prisons and they send him to the new experimental unit at Barlinnie. Boyle is trying to open a parcel and one of the warders gives him a pair of scissors, he looks in disbelief, is this another planet? They managed to cultivate an interest in art and he became a world famous sculptor.
Bizarre as it may seem because you don’t have anyone peering over your shoulder, you actually end up going above and beyond the call of duty. The highlight is the annual meeting at Oxford where you get 15 minutes to present your report to your peers. There are all the archaic Oxford University conventions where every college has their own set of rules and regulations from library use to breakfast (the Cambridge based novel ‘Porterhouse Blue’ is good background reading).
The Farmington is unique, but it just shows that there aren’t that many ragged trousered philanthropists out there.
2. It Could Be You!
The Lottery funds projects like the Local Heritage Initiative, Heritage Lottery Fund and Awards for All. We managed to hit the jackpot and got £20,000 to make a film about local history. The application process is quite bureaucratic and time consuming and some areas of the country seem to be preferred over others. Also the word on the street is to get your bids in now before money is diverted to fund monosyllabic drug cheats to sprint round a reclaimed rubbish trip waving the Union Jack – a.k.a. ‘The London Olympics 2012’.
3. The British Council
When I wanted to make a link with a school in another country, in my naivety I phoned the LEA. After being put through to about five different extensions where people denied all responsibility, I was eventually put through to someone who admitted that it might be something to do with him. He said he’d, “Get back to me”, he never did (our LEA has this tunnel vision where if it’s not something to do with climbing up the league tables they ain’t interested), so once again it was a case of Sinn Fein – ‘Ourselves Alone’.
The British Council run some excellent sessions on how to twin with other countries, but you have to be pro-active and find a partner yourself. Some partnerships break down because teachers move or change jobs, there’s a large element of luck involved in finding the right partner. The forms are quite complicated and supply cover isn’t fully funded. If you can take a group of children overseas it’s a fantastic experience for them, we took ours to Ireland.
4. Walter Hines Scholarship
Every teacher union can send a ‘scholar’ on a two-week trip to the USA with supply costs covered. The scheme is administered by the English Speaking Union. You have to attend an interview at their imposing headquarters in London, don’t worry very few people apply for this award so there’s a high chance of success. The HQ is like some relic from a bygone colonial era, there’s lots of PAs and secretaries floating around called Cynthia, Fiona or Daphne with cut-glass English accents, then there’s the wooden boards with all the past officials embossed in gold plate writing, all with impressive double-barrelled names and heaps of letters after them.
I had to smile because at the top was ‘Patron – the Duke of Edinburgh’. This is the man who is banned from saying anything in public, there were the notorious comment to English students in Beijing that if they stayed any longer they’d get ‘slitty eyed’, his ‘joke’ in New Guinea about cannibalism and just to prove that he’s Mr Sensitive after the Dunblane massacre there were calls for gun controls dismissed by the Duke because ‘they’d try to ban cricket bats next’.
English speaking – Duke of Edinburgh, surely a contradiction in terms? The original oxymoron? Not that I’ve got anything against people from another country who want to come over here and marry beneath themselves. As Celebrity Big Brother has proved some of the natives who boast English as a first language can’t speak ‘proper’ and don’t have a clue where ‘East Angular’ is.
5. Holocaust Education
This is run by the Imperial War Museum and you will be expected to develop your own education programme. You have to commit a chunk of your holidays, initial training is at the end of July, and in return you get to spend a week in Jerusalem in February and then a week in Auschwitz during October half term.
6. BT School Awards
This is that rare thing in our society a business that actually gives money to schools – no strings attached. Most schemes involve ‘cause-related marketing’ where if you save thousands of vouchers you’ll get a computer mouse. A serious blow to these schemes came with Cadbury’s ‘Free Sports Equipment’ campaign It was scrapped after it was revealed that pupils would have to eat 5,440 chocolate bars, containing 33kg of fat and nearly 1.25 million calories, to qualify for a set of volleyball posts.
Every year BT spends millions on the project and hundreds of schools are involved, three are chosen for an extra £10,000 award. The only problem is that I don’t want to end up like America where the education system is seriously under-funded and schools and local authorities have to go round with the begging bowl to big business. Also I wouldn’t be happy taking money from British Nuclear Fuels, tobacco companies or the armaments industry, not that this would apply to BAE, they’re far to busy bribing the Saudi royal family.
7. TES Newsday
If you want to spend time with your children trying to produce a newspaper in one day and finish it as a gibbering wreck then this is the one for you. The highlight is the awards ceremony at the House of Commons, for more details on this read ‘How Not to Teach’.
8. MA
The MA or MEd used to be a sort of gold standard for research and was almost required by some schools for a headship. That requirement has been officially replaced by the NPQH, which prepares its students for the modern job description of a head teacher – administrator, accountant, general factotum and LEA whipping boy.
Naturally Woodhead managed to set the tone again when he described most educational research as “useless”. Studying for an MA you don’t get any time off and you have to pay hundreds of pounds for the privilege. Don’t harbour the illusion that it will help you gain promotion or another job. Most of my interviews have featured the following exchange-
Me: I’ve completed an MA in the creative use of ICT and in developing children’s thinking skills
Panel: Very interesting. Can you tell us how you have used target setting, testing and assessment to boost children’s National Curriculum levels?
Me: Er… waffle, waffle, waffle.
Panel: We’ll be in touch.
9. Local Awards
As the LEAs have faded into oblivion the courses and training events they used to offer are no more, if you want to develop as a teacher and pedagogue basically it’s up to you. The City Learning Centres do offer some ‘creative sabbaticals’ but as with the rest of the education world it’s usually a case of feast or famine. One minute they’re spending money like there’s no tomorrow the next moment half their staff are being made redundant, so choose your moment carefully.
Another avenue for funding is through your local Community Service Volunteers, it’s well worth giving them a ring to see if they can help.
10. The rest
If you’re absolutely knackered and can’t face another ten or twenty years of teaching then Goldsmiths’ Mid-Career Break is just the tonic you need. They award grants of up to £3,000 to enable teachers to enjoy a complete break from the classroom for a period of four to six weeks. In addition they will meet the cost of the first four weeks' supply cover.
Creative Partnerships probably deserves a place right up my league table but as I haven’t any direct experience I’ll have to leave them here. Hundreds of millions have been spent on schools in a wide variety of locations, however their future after 2008 looks uncertain.
I have read on the TES web site that the Oxford and Cambridge colleges offer sabbaticals for teachers, but for the life of me I can’t find it on the Internet. The guidelines are probably written in gold lettering in an archaic Latin script on calf vellum and locked away in a dark musty vault at the Bodleian Library.
If you do win any of the above don’t expect to be flavour of the month in the staff room. When I came back from two weeks in Germany most of the staff greeted me with a curt ‘Morning!’ Nothing like ‘How was the trip?’ Schools are vast storehouses for gossip, intrigue, jealousy and vicious backbiting. Not to worry I’m not interested in promotion or sucking up to the senior management team or attending any of the mind numbingly boring LEA coordinators’ meetings, I’m just happy being a sabbatical and awards junky.
My benchmark is what will the children remember from being in my class? Will it be the A3 laminated sheets with targets for every part of the curriculum that I’m forced to plaster the walls with, will they recall that moment when they moved from a 3B to a 3A, will they have fond memories of the half termly tests I’m required to force down their throats? Or will they remember the film project they acted in, or the trip to Ireland, or the visit to the House of Commons? Strange to say and whisper it very quietly, but when I came into teaching I actually wanted to… inspire them.
Labels: Work
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Extracting the Bodily FluidsAfter school activities? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I’m not someone who’ll readily volunteer these days. Aside from being dumped on from a great height by the media and by assorted governments, our school was deemed to need “intensive support” for years. The LEA operated the neat syllogism: poor results- equals useless school - equals crap teachers. Consequently we had teams of ‘consultants’ poring over our planning and appearing like spectres in our lessons scribbling furiously on copious sheets of paper. This wasn’t a great inducement to stay after school and teach children – without pay.
After school events take time – organising lifts, sending letters home and sorting out replies. Then there’s the parents… most of them weren’t a problem, there was the odd moaner but you get that everywhere. However, if I’m honest what finally ground me down was that no one ever used that simple word “thanks”.
The latest “initiative” is ‘Gifted and Talented’, so LEAs are pressurising schools to arrange events and other organisations are getting in on the act. At our staff meeting we were informed that a Premiership football club were hosting a series of media training events at their study centre – I won’t ‘name and shame’ them, but let’s just say that last season they were one of the top twenty wealthiest football clubs in the world.
Six evening sessions were being prepared from 4 pm until 6 pm, so by the time we got the children back to school and saw them off home, it would be a 7 pm finish, all this without pay, free, gratis, on the house. I’m sure it didn’t cross the minds of the organisers, failed to register anywhere in their consciousness that teachers would get any remuneration.
So here’s this Premiership club that spends £37 million on wages (the bulk of which doesn’t go to the programme sellers or catering staff) but can’t afford a bean for teachers. Yes, it’s the Premiership folks! Extortionate prices for season tickets, it costs nine times more to watch Real Madrid than Wigan; dodgy owners, West Ham’s new proprietor Icelander Bjorgolfur Gudmondsson was convicted in 1991 of embezzlement and accounting offences and given a suspended prison sentence and then there’s the pampered, privileged, mercenaries a.k.a. ‘the players’ – the sexual mores of an alley cat, the intellectual prowess of a Big Brother contestant and the same standards of loyalty as Vidkun Quisling. Is there any Evertonian that can forget that moment when Wayne ‘Once a Blue Always a Blue’ Rooney scuttled down the M62 and accepted Alex Ferguson’s thirty pieces of silver? Mind you with Colleen’s horrendous shopping bills who can blame the poor lad? Then there’s Ashley Cole who threw a hissy fit and accused Arsenal of “taking the piss” when they offered him a new contract on the paltry wage of £50,000 a week.
In teaching there’s always the emotional blackmail that we should do it “for the children”. I’ve got a different take on it, the best thing we could do “for the children”, is to have teachers who aren’t stressed out by long hours, feel valued by society, don’t have to jump to the latest “initiative” and won’t be expected by all and sundry to work for nothing. Lest we forget, up to half of NQTs leave teaching within the first five years.
At the staff meeting there was muted agreement about covering the event, talk about a rota, no one asked me, maybe it was the body language – arms folded, jaw set, teeth gritted, eyes wide open staring into the distance in disbelief. Teachers really are fools to themselves, their own worst enemies.
An evening at a Premiership club’s study centre – without pay? To quote once again that wise old philosopher Ashley Cole, they really are, “taking the piss”.
Monday, December 11, 2006
YulephobicIt’s probably a sign of advancing years, but I’ve become more Yulephobic. It was different when my children were young; there was the excitement of Christmas Eve, leaving out a carrot for Rudolph and a mince pie for Father Christmas, trying to get them to go to sleep, the joy on their faces in the morning, opening their stockings and tearing the wrapping paper off the presents.
As you get older it’s really difficult to buy people presents, if you don’t spend enough you look like a cheapskate or if you do buy or receive an expensive present, it’s not exactly what you wanted - if any relatives are reading this blog all presents have been gratefully received, even the fridge magnets…
What I really hate about Christmas is the commercially induced mass hysteria that seems to infect people, there’s a lemming like rush towards shopping centres and malls. I steer clear of them at the best of times but the weeks before Christmas they become a ‘No-Go’ area. I’m more of an outdoors type of person, instead you’re all cooped up together in one room watching those horrendous TV ‘specials’ or those films that have been on every Christmas from time immemorial (it’s ‘Groundhog Day’ as the ‘Guns of Navarone’ is repeated on a loop).
The rampant commercialisation of Christmas is all pervading, as parents have to buy those sought after branded toys, clothes and games. Some of them spend hundreds if not thousands of pounds on ‘educational’ computer games when the best investment in their children’s future would be to hear them read and recite stories to them.
Here’s an idea of how far the rising tide of commercialisation and ‘brand loyalty’ has reached-
· 70% of three year olds recognise McDonalds but only half know their own surname
· The average ten year old has internalised 300 to 400 brands
· It’s estimated that the average child in Britain and America watches 20,000 to 40,000 TV adverts per year
· Walmart’s website encourages children to choose items and enter their parents’ email address so they can “help pester your parents for you”
· An American professor has found 300 girls called Armani and others named L’Oreal
In school you’re filling the sandbags against the encroaching flood as Christmas seems to advance every year a few more days into the calendar. In the juniors we used to have the pantomimes or shows, sadly this has been edged out as preparation for the SATs test invade our time. Every year we used to do a pantomime, the most memorable was when four of the toughest boys were persuaded to dress-up as the four ugly sisters in ‘Cinderella’, they absolutely loved it and one of them it wasn’t so much finding his feminine side as exploring a different sexuality.
The infants still have their nativity play, one year the star character the ‘Grumpy Shepherd’ was taken ill at the last minute, I offered to stand-in, but our ex-head Erica didn’t want anyone to upstage her in front of the parents so another child was drafted in who was really nervous and forgot nearly all the lines. The infant staff did organise an alternative show with me as the star, the children loved it and it was remembered for years.
In every school there is fierce competition for the main roles of Mary and Joseph (usually from the mothers). An interesting piece of research would be: ‘Parent Governors and the allocation of main parts in the infant school nativity play’. I think there would be a high correlation.
For some teachers there’s that expectation of expensive presents from grateful parents. One teacher used to line up presents at the front of her desk with children’s names prominently displayed, as the week progressed children would be shamed into giving something. I’m not that cruel some parents just can’t afford it.
As practices for the plays, choir performances, fairs, visits and hysteria begin to invade the timetable I always make a booklet of word searches, quizzes and colouring to keep children occupied for short time intervals between the above events.
It’s also a time to show films, but not ‘stick the video on for the afternoon’. I find that 45 minutes is about the maximum, like the old movie houses I show them in two or three episodes. There’s the old version of ‘Scrooge’ with Alistair Sim and Bill Murray’s ‘Scrooged’ – not a patch on the original. You also have to survive Dickens’ sanctimonious moralising as Oscar Wilde noted, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” My all time favourite Christmas film is Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.
Happy Christmas everyone and if you’re short of a decent present I can recommend an excellent book written by a primary school teacher… Hell’s teeth this advertising creeps in everywhere!
Labels: Holidays, Work, Writing
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Ofsted and the psychosis of failureAn incurable optimist who harboured the illusion that the new head of Ofsted, Christine Gilbert, would usher in a new era of peace, love and understanding would have been shattered by her presentation of Ofsted’s annual report. It inspired the grisly tabloid headlines that 40% of schools (including over half of secondary schools) are now deemed to be ‘inadequate’.
Previously those schools in special measures or serious weaknesses were judged to be failing. Now Ofsted in seeking to ‘raise the bar’ have combined them together with ‘satisfactory’ schools to create the new category of ‘inadequate’. So in Ofsted ‘newspeak’ satisfactory is the new rubbish.
What does this do for the morale of dedicated teachers who spend their careers in tough schools with difficult classes? After all that investment of time, emotional and intellectual energy they’re branded as ‘inadequate’.
The only way to escape this tag is to jump through the hoops, vault all the hurdles and negotiate the assault course of an Ofsted inspection and emerge as ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’.
Ofsted’s main judgement is by utilising crude test results, yet I know some ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ schools that are dull, lifeless exam factories staffed by stressed-out automatons who could squeeze out any love of learning from the children who enter the school gates.
And just to prove that their relentless focus is on failure for ‘outstanding’ schools Ofsted has introduced a ‘light touch’ inspection. An early example of this was at William Allitt secondary school in Derbyshire where one inspector visited for one day and some of the lesson observations lasted for only ten minutes.
Ofsted rarely make any concessions to social context or deprivation. Research by the London School of Economics found that out of 180 schools deemed to be failing in 1999/2000, 90% were in disadvantaged communities. Schools in the leafy suburbs rarely, if ever, fail.
As the Local Education Authorities shrink into virtual invisibility and obscurity there is no outside agency to give continuing support to schools. We have the ‘falling off the cliffs’ scenario, where only spectacular failure will bring monetary investment or outside assistance.
Of course Ofsted claim that by giving some schools a good beating it helps to straighten them out – a similar argument was advanced for corporal punishment. However, the House of Commons Education Select Committee noted that failure could send schools into a spiral of decline. Some 43 schools judged to be in serious weakness in 2001/2 had declined further and were placed in special measures the following year. They noted that some schools were, “unable to attract high-achieving pupils or well-qualified staff, making improvement more difficult.” Of those schools placed in special measures between 1995 and 1997, 40% subsequently closed.
It’s no surprise that hundreds of schools have to re-advertise or struggle to find a head teacher. Is there a sane person or anyone with an instinct for self-preservation or survival that would want to be a head teacher of a school in “challenging” circumstances?
Ofsted justify their inspections by claiming that they are ‘thorough’ and ‘rigorous’. But they completely failed to spot Bromley’s Imelda Marcos – Colleen McCabe. She embezzled £500,000 from St John Rigby College between 1994 and 1999. She spent the money on shoes, exotic holidays, cosmetics and a Crystal Palace season ticket. Yet 18 months after she began to use the school funds as a personal bank account Ofsted reported that McCabe provided “strong, sensitive and skilful leadership”. Financial planning was “good” and the auditor’s report was “excellent”.
Just to prove that this wasn’t an isolated example in 2006 the General Teaching Council found head teacher Mark Braine of Avon Valley School, Warwickshire guilty of unacceptable professional conduct and of abusing, bullying and humiliating staff between 1992 and 2005. However, an Ofsted report in 2004 was extremely complimentary about his leadership skills.
It’s a legitimate question to ask – how have Ofsted got away with it for so long? The paradox is that teaching is one of the most highly unionised professions – over 90% of teachers are members. Yet there has been a collective failure to deal with this 800 lb gorilla rampaging through our education system, trashing schools and demoralising teachers. Apart from passing the customary vacuous conference resolutions what have the leaders of the teachers’ unions actually done to stop Ofsted in its tracks? Answers on a postcard to Chris Keates, Mary Bousted and Steve Sinnott.
Labels: Ofsted, Schools, Testing, Work
Saturday, September 16, 2006
The Silence of the LambsI’ll do anything to get out of the staff ‘do’, last summer it was my son’s birthday (I took in the birth certificate to silence the doubters) we just had a quiet meal, then he went out with his mates to get legless. You can’t choose your workmates or your family but you can choose your friends. But not wanting to be seen as a grinch I paid up front for the Christmas night out.
One of the problems with primary teaching is the ‘goldfish bowl syndrome’. Staff spend most of their time in this cloistered environment. It’s also prey to intrigue, gossip and back biting. Coming late into teaching I know some of them need to get out more. There’s also the long hours, nose to the grindstone, where teachers spend countless hours planning, ticking boxes and assessing and lose sight of why they came into teaching in the first place – to inspire children and create a love for learning.
For the staff meeting I prepared a hand out against formal half termly testing, when it came to the agenda item I waited … and waited. It was the silence of the lambs. Then came the usual justification that, “we needed to do it for Ofsted.” Yeah, if you let gangsters take over your community you’re finished, what about doing what’s right for children?
Have some teachers lost the will to teach? I didn’t come into teaching to test children to destruction. What will it take for teachers to speak out? Thumbscrews to get better results? Yeah, I think some schools have tried that already. I’m sure in America when elementary schools banned morning and afternoon playtimes teachers sat there in silence and justified it by saying, “we’ve got to do something to improve our results.”
In primary teaching imagination, creativity, reasoning, critical thinking, spontaneity have become part of a dead language, teachers will gaze back in incomprehension, “how do we measure it, where are the tick boxes, can we level it?”
I know there is a streak of religious and political fundamentalism that works from the premise that, either you’re with us or against us, no shades of grey. Any deviation from the line or the way of truth and people are treated as apostates, heretics and traitors (read Garrison Keiller’s ‘Lake Wobegone Days’ about the Plymouth Bretheren for more details). I’ve lived through that as well and it doesn’t work. You can’t judge people entirely by your own standards, sometimes you have to trim and make alliances.
On the other hand there are certain standards or moral absolutes, sometimes you have to make hard choices. Do you cross a picket line, speak out against vile racism or stop someone getting beaten up in the street? I’m not setting myself up as a paragon of virtue or a moral arbiter, I’d fail on the last one, I’m a physical coward, my wife is much more courageous when it comes to that.
Every morning when I glance in the mirror I’m looking myself in the face, both literally and metaphorically but I can’t look people in the face who can impose or acquiesce in testing children to death. A futile gesture? Probably, but I’ve pulled out of the Christmas night out.
Aside from all the high falutin’ morals ‘n’ ethics I must be honest gentle reader, a crateful of cheap lager down my gullet and I know I’ll go OTT and tell some of the spine of a jellyfish staff what I think of them. I don’t relish coming back in the New Year after that - “Could I have a little word please?” Somehow I just don’t want to break bread with people inhabiting a moral charnel house. I may be the last of the True Believers, but so be it.
Sometimes I wonder if I am the only sane person left in the education asylum.
