A funny old week, with people saying that children are over-tested and undertaught, and that parents should have the right to get Ofsted in to inspect schools as often as possible - presumably in the belief that's what's obviously not sauce for the children is sauce for the teachers.
I cannot think of a worse idea than giving parents the right to get schools inspected. It's simply mob rule by any other name. Hermione will have her pigtails pulled in Clapham and Mrs Sacheverell Smythe will be onto Ofsted like a leech on a new leg in the pond. People whose kids attend the glorious "Academy" where Year 8 grilled me about whether I spit or swallow, there has been no full maths faculty for over a year and the HoD won't take responsibility for setting the work and children leave the class and wander about at will (on one occasion lobbing a brick through a classroom window, to a satisfying shattering of glass and smattering of hysteria), will not have any idea how bad things have got, and should they do so, Ofsted will come and fail the school and nothing will be done. Ofsted is not a solution to everything. Or, judging by what follows its yaffling visits, anything. (The school whose English department failed its inspection has still got the same Head in post, and no sign of anything happening, although I wait with baited breath.)
The solution - and this is also perhaps a solution to how to make people happier, another news story last week - is perhaps to DO SOMETHING. I know it's radical and ridiculous, and I also know that the government pees its pants at the thought that people might do something, but that's their prerogative.
Schools should be allowed to put consequences in place for children who throw bricks through windows, and the government should suck it up and provide for those consequences. While the ethos in schools continues to be that children can behave exactly as they wish and their teachers must take the consequences, it is very hard to see how kids have much chance of learning not to be vile at school. When vileness is modelled and inadequately punished, they simply learn to be a bunch of self-righteous arses, and giving their parents the power to back them up will assist them in growing up into even worse arses.
Then we can all watch them complaining about being on the dole while they refuse to work on documentaries, and gasp in shock and outrage when they kill each other with stones in parks and knives outside McDonalds. What a fun-filled world the government has in mind for us. Still, one sees so few of them on Oxford Street these days.
Tuesday 20 May 2008
Saturday 22 March 2008
A Good Smacked Bottom
When I was small, the Ultimate Deterrent was always the threat of a good smacked bottom. I fully understood that when my mother threatened to give me one of these, she wasn't proposing to get this item from a box on top of the wardrobe and present it to me with a ribbon round it - no, her goal was a goodness modification to my own small backside. And when threatened with this, I knew very well that the Clog Brandishing Lady was not amenable to reason, and that those stairs that I had to get up by the count of ten to evade the translation of my bottom to the realms of virtue had to be got up now. I argued, as any child will do, until she had reached six, but then I ran like hell, because my mother didn't mean half way up the stairs where she could still see and hear me, she meant in my room with the door shut. And reader, she did mean it.
I don't know where she got that phrase - a good smacked bottom - for it seems unlikely that my bottom would imbued with goodness by a smack, and anyway, it was not generally my bottom with which my mother had the issue. In the confederacy of my small Krenzly bod, my bottom was the sufferer for the sins of my mouth or my stroppy flouncing about which broke stuff. As I grew older, it also occurred to me that my mother was modelling some very poor grammar, as what she really proposed was not a good smacked bottom at all, but a well smacked bottom - something like a well tempered Klavier.
I did not like to be hit, but I retained no lasting emotional scars from the "good smacked bottom" run-ins, partly because I got the fuck out of the way. I did not like men or boys to be too close to me, and I ascribe this partly to the fact that - unlike my mother - my brother and my father did not deal in threat or warning, they just hauled off and whacked you round the chops or in the belly and that was that. I learnt to get the fuck out of the way of them as well, but a damn sight sooner - ie I avoided them altogether.
At school, I was never threatened with any form of violence by those in authority over me. I got into plenty of fights with boys larger and more violent than myself, but bar the loss of my front teeth, I got by outside my house just fine. And also bar the eternal naughtiness in Year 8 maths - when I used to take yo-yos and rubber balls to school to occupy myself during my inevitable exclusion from class - and a notable occasion when I sat muttering swear words at my teacher whenever he approached me for a lesson - I survived seven years at secondary school without running into trouble for my poor attitude.
The reason I mention this is that my attitude was poor. I was a very self-conscious rebel - without a clue how to show my full rebelliousness, but also without much of the required backbone. I was arsy and full of myself and had a lot of aggression going nowhere, but I did not usually spend my time in school in trouble. My parents meant business. I skived, I loafed, I calculated the exact amount of laziness I could carry off without trouble - and I was quiet in lessons, wrote essays and copied up experiments and learned distressingly difficult valents, equations and mathematical theories without a bleat. My parents never made me. I was famous in my circle for the fact that my parents did not ever organise me or ask about my homework. But I knew very well - and so did my siblings - that my parents meant business.
Teachers at my school were almost never ill. The school was selective and children were streamed or set and did their work. When we were in year nine, two boys were caught with drugs on the school premises. We never saw them again. My school meant business.
I hated school. I felt - rightly or wrongly - that nobody there gave a shit about me or my fellow students. We worked a lot out of books, and I never saw a four part lesson in my life. Most of the extra curricular activities were netball, at which I sucked. But I was given books - one between two - and quiet - lessons of total silence to write or complete maths problems in - and I for this I am still grateful.
Whether any of this means anything in terms of education and achievement I can't tell. I know that teachers now are perpetually ill - and I ascribe this to the horrible behaviour they are expected to countenance. I know that children constantly complain of headaches towards the end of the day, particularly if the class grow noisy. Sometimes they ask for "a quiet lesson" - reading or writing or drawing in "silence" (meaning they whisper).
Children don't like being smacked, and it seems pretty nasty to bully somebody smaller than yourself. However, if you don't teach children how to behave, they won't know. Some parents encourage their children to be disrespectful to teachers. Such people should home-school their kids, with books lovingly paid for by the state. Few parents smack their kids without some shame nowadays, though at the end of three years of 24/7 parenting, parents turn out to be human, and so it still goes on. And I doubt if it does them any harm. Plenty of things harmed me but I got over the smacked bottoms - or threat thereof - just fine. Think on.
I don't know where she got that phrase - a good smacked bottom - for it seems unlikely that my bottom would imbued with goodness by a smack, and anyway, it was not generally my bottom with which my mother had the issue. In the confederacy of my small Krenzly bod, my bottom was the sufferer for the sins of my mouth or my stroppy flouncing about which broke stuff. As I grew older, it also occurred to me that my mother was modelling some very poor grammar, as what she really proposed was not a good smacked bottom at all, but a well smacked bottom - something like a well tempered Klavier.
I did not like to be hit, but I retained no lasting emotional scars from the "good smacked bottom" run-ins, partly because I got the fuck out of the way. I did not like men or boys to be too close to me, and I ascribe this partly to the fact that - unlike my mother - my brother and my father did not deal in threat or warning, they just hauled off and whacked you round the chops or in the belly and that was that. I learnt to get the fuck out of the way of them as well, but a damn sight sooner - ie I avoided them altogether.
At school, I was never threatened with any form of violence by those in authority over me. I got into plenty of fights with boys larger and more violent than myself, but bar the loss of my front teeth, I got by outside my house just fine. And also bar the eternal naughtiness in Year 8 maths - when I used to take yo-yos and rubber balls to school to occupy myself during my inevitable exclusion from class - and a notable occasion when I sat muttering swear words at my teacher whenever he approached me for a lesson - I survived seven years at secondary school without running into trouble for my poor attitude.
The reason I mention this is that my attitude was poor. I was a very self-conscious rebel - without a clue how to show my full rebelliousness, but also without much of the required backbone. I was arsy and full of myself and had a lot of aggression going nowhere, but I did not usually spend my time in school in trouble. My parents meant business. I skived, I loafed, I calculated the exact amount of laziness I could carry off without trouble - and I was quiet in lessons, wrote essays and copied up experiments and learned distressingly difficult valents, equations and mathematical theories without a bleat. My parents never made me. I was famous in my circle for the fact that my parents did not ever organise me or ask about my homework. But I knew very well - and so did my siblings - that my parents meant business.
Teachers at my school were almost never ill. The school was selective and children were streamed or set and did their work. When we were in year nine, two boys were caught with drugs on the school premises. We never saw them again. My school meant business.
I hated school. I felt - rightly or wrongly - that nobody there gave a shit about me or my fellow students. We worked a lot out of books, and I never saw a four part lesson in my life. Most of the extra curricular activities were netball, at which I sucked. But I was given books - one between two - and quiet - lessons of total silence to write or complete maths problems in - and I for this I am still grateful.
Whether any of this means anything in terms of education and achievement I can't tell. I know that teachers now are perpetually ill - and I ascribe this to the horrible behaviour they are expected to countenance. I know that children constantly complain of headaches towards the end of the day, particularly if the class grow noisy. Sometimes they ask for "a quiet lesson" - reading or writing or drawing in "silence" (meaning they whisper).
Children don't like being smacked, and it seems pretty nasty to bully somebody smaller than yourself. However, if you don't teach children how to behave, they won't know. Some parents encourage their children to be disrespectful to teachers. Such people should home-school their kids, with books lovingly paid for by the state. Few parents smack their kids without some shame nowadays, though at the end of three years of 24/7 parenting, parents turn out to be human, and so it still goes on. And I doubt if it does them any harm. Plenty of things harmed me but I got over the smacked bottoms - or threat thereof - just fine. Think on.
Saturday 9 February 2008
Who the hell are you? And what are you doing?
... I wonder as strange and unattractively behaved boys lope into my classroom, 45 minutes into an hour long lesson. I imagine that they'd be asking the same about me, except that we all know who I am - I'm Supply.
The question hovers in my mind as I read about the ministers for education. Who the fuck are they, eh? Didn't go to my school. Did they go to state schools at all, the people who decide what becomes of them? Have they ever even set foot in one? I want to know.
Here is my survey for all MPs, thinktank members and QUANGO directors involved in evolving education policy:
1. Were you educated in a state or private school?
2. If you have children, are they educated in a state or private school?
3. Have you ever taught under 16s? If so, what age group and during what era?
4. If the answers to the above run private, private, no, what do you know about education?
BONUS QUESTION 5. Were you actually elected? And if the answer to this one is no, perhaps you'd like to answer the question in the title of this blog.
Interesting things are afoot in Bristol Education. The famous new Redland Green School is oversubscribed and now has a shrinking catchment area - smaller than it was designed to have, as apparently the entire middle class of Bristol with secondary school age children has moved into the area to get their kids into a middle class state school - the only one the city has, so a radical new departure.
You'd think this resounding success would send the council scurrying into their burrows to plan another school, so that yet more middle class pupils could be clawed back from South Gloucestershire and improve the Bristol League Tables. Not a bit of it. Bristol City Council is made of sterner stuff. A reputation for incompetence like theirs is not acquired overnight, you know.
In any case, they are already heavily committed elsewhere. Both Withywood and Hengrove - in the poverty-stricken south - are being turned into academies. Oo - ooh. (I can tell you right now that no child from Stokey Bish or any other of those northern suburbs will be going anywhere near either of them).
Withywood is a fascinating school; a third of the kids who leave in Year 11 didn't start in Year 7, and another third have special educational needs; the same proportion have free school lunches. It is nearly 100% white, and many of the kids come from homes where nobody has the faintest notion of what employment is like. 1999 statistics showed 42% of families in receipt of means-tested benefits, and as recently as 2006 second-generation unemployment was cited as a major issue in the challenge of regeneration of the area. There isn't any local employment, and the children emerging from Withywood School have not the skills to get the plentiful jobs available - and certainly not the gritty determination to compete with the migrant community to get them.
Kids in the area are poorly motivated to attend school, or to behave when they get there. It is the school with the highest proportion of supply teaching I have ever been part of. There was one particular subject we all dreaded; it was known that there had been no citizenship teacher in post for the whole academic year, and that nobody had taken responsibility for the curriculum or its delivery. When you arrived for a lesson, you had 30 children with no support, or assistance, or habits of work, and no lesson either. It was an object lesson in pointlessness, and the only time I summoned support I was told I had to focus on one or two disruptive children. When everybody is behaving like an extra from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, it seems so unfair to pick on one or two.
It was illustrative of the rather nutty approach to behaviour management though - they also gave out lottery tickets for good behaviour and you could win over £100 (and a free taxi home so the other kids didn't rob you and your mother got it intact.) Or nothing. So important not to fix relationships between good behaviour and measurable reward.
The thing that intrigues me currently, however, is that both the putative academies have two head teachers - one still running the current school, and one living in the furthest wing, who is a "Principal Designate". In the case of Withywood, this is an alumnus of the school who has run a very successful school in Devon for some years, while Withywood has been worsening away like a festering wound.
Hengrove have appointed a head who has been in situ in a school in Cannock since 2004. This is a tenure of a mere three years, in a school whose Ofsted in December 2003 mentioned a different head whose leadership was specifically praised, and who had already turned the school around. It is a school (Blake Valley Technology School) about two thirds size of Hengrove, which today appeared to have no working website - unusual for a Technology School. The current head of Hengrove, whose leadership fished the school out of special measures two years ago and who has kept it on track since, making it one of SSAT's most improved, has been passed over. The new academy will be run by OASIS, who are a Christian group whose declared specialision is the promotion of justice. We will wait and see what this produces, from the various distant wings of the various schools they brood and plan in. Whoever the hell they are, and what they are doing.
The question hovers in my mind as I read about the ministers for education. Who the fuck are they, eh? Didn't go to my school. Did they go to state schools at all, the people who decide what becomes of them? Have they ever even set foot in one? I want to know.
Here is my survey for all MPs, thinktank members and QUANGO directors involved in evolving education policy:
1. Were you educated in a state or private school?
2. If you have children, are they educated in a state or private school?
3. Have you ever taught under 16s? If so, what age group and during what era?
4. If the answers to the above run private, private, no, what do you know about education?
BONUS QUESTION 5. Were you actually elected? And if the answer to this one is no, perhaps you'd like to answer the question in the title of this blog.
Interesting things are afoot in Bristol Education. The famous new Redland Green School is oversubscribed and now has a shrinking catchment area - smaller than it was designed to have, as apparently the entire middle class of Bristol with secondary school age children has moved into the area to get their kids into a middle class state school - the only one the city has, so a radical new departure.
You'd think this resounding success would send the council scurrying into their burrows to plan another school, so that yet more middle class pupils could be clawed back from South Gloucestershire and improve the Bristol League Tables. Not a bit of it. Bristol City Council is made of sterner stuff. A reputation for incompetence like theirs is not acquired overnight, you know.
In any case, they are already heavily committed elsewhere. Both Withywood and Hengrove - in the poverty-stricken south - are being turned into academies. Oo - ooh. (I can tell you right now that no child from Stokey Bish or any other of those northern suburbs will be going anywhere near either of them).
Withywood is a fascinating school; a third of the kids who leave in Year 11 didn't start in Year 7, and another third have special educational needs; the same proportion have free school lunches. It is nearly 100% white, and many of the kids come from homes where nobody has the faintest notion of what employment is like. 1999 statistics showed 42% of families in receipt of means-tested benefits, and as recently as 2006 second-generation unemployment was cited as a major issue in the challenge of regeneration of the area. There isn't any local employment, and the children emerging from Withywood School have not the skills to get the plentiful jobs available - and certainly not the gritty determination to compete with the migrant community to get them.
Kids in the area are poorly motivated to attend school, or to behave when they get there. It is the school with the highest proportion of supply teaching I have ever been part of. There was one particular subject we all dreaded; it was known that there had been no citizenship teacher in post for the whole academic year, and that nobody had taken responsibility for the curriculum or its delivery. When you arrived for a lesson, you had 30 children with no support, or assistance, or habits of work, and no lesson either. It was an object lesson in pointlessness, and the only time I summoned support I was told I had to focus on one or two disruptive children. When everybody is behaving like an extra from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, it seems so unfair to pick on one or two.
It was illustrative of the rather nutty approach to behaviour management though - they also gave out lottery tickets for good behaviour and you could win over £100 (and a free taxi home so the other kids didn't rob you and your mother got it intact.) Or nothing. So important not to fix relationships between good behaviour and measurable reward.
The thing that intrigues me currently, however, is that both the putative academies have two head teachers - one still running the current school, and one living in the furthest wing, who is a "Principal Designate". In the case of Withywood, this is an alumnus of the school who has run a very successful school in Devon for some years, while Withywood has been worsening away like a festering wound.
Hengrove have appointed a head who has been in situ in a school in Cannock since 2004. This is a tenure of a mere three years, in a school whose Ofsted in December 2003 mentioned a different head whose leadership was specifically praised, and who had already turned the school around. It is a school (Blake Valley Technology School) about two thirds size of Hengrove, which today appeared to have no working website - unusual for a Technology School. The current head of Hengrove, whose leadership fished the school out of special measures two years ago and who has kept it on track since, making it one of SSAT's most improved, has been passed over. The new academy will be run by OASIS, who are a Christian group whose declared specialision is the promotion of justice. We will wait and see what this produces, from the various distant wings of the various schools they brood and plan in. Whoever the hell they are, and what they are doing.
Wednesday 30 January 2008
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Ofsted?
I thought all teachers were. But the longer I spend in the trenches, the more I wonder why. Do you know anyone who's lost their job because of an inspection? Do you even know of a school which has been closed because of one? In fact, failing an Ofsted seems a fast-track route to improving facilities and increasing revenue. And this where I was confidently informed a few years ago that "you can pass your Ofsted on the quality of your wall displays alone." Good Godfrey Cambridge, that seems wrong.
The government harps constantly on "teaching and learning", but it seems that this is not what Ofsted inspects. If not, why not? Is it because the government doesn't know what it's doing, or is it because they cannot tell the truth about their agenda for schools? Because surely the push against truancy has as much to do with keeping potential Artful Dodgers under adult supervision as it does with "raising standards"; and the amount of social work now undertaken in school time and/or using school as the first stop seems steadily rising.
Furthermore, Ofsted's hands are pretty much tied in the case of schools that are clearly succeeding. Where exam results exceed 70% A*-C they cannot find too much fault, even if the whole school does nothing but sit at desks copying all day, every day. It is the weaker schools - those "failing" - which are most vulnerable to Ofsted meddling. Shame it doesn't meddle with the right things.
I spent last week teaching in an academy. Academy, of course, is the Newspeak term for a school so bad that it would have been closed down had not some bright spark decided that changing its name to something derived from the Greek would surely revolutionise its intake, culture and results - presumably in that order.
Judging by what I found this revolution is taking some time. Much of the school suffered from being permanently locked. The children expressed their feelings about this on my third day by entirely removing the lock of a classroom, which then locked us in, necessitating emergency calls to the switchboard for repairs. Interestingly, they were thrilled to be locked in, which was particularly strange because it was very much the norm for children to leave lessons at will, sometimes to call on other classrooms, sometimes to return, disappointed with the corridors, sometimes to vanish into the ether. Although there were great legions of the damned sweeping the corridors in search of errant children, they were seldom returned, though by the end of any lesson there were usually a couple of little faces at the windows of the door making sign-language at the inmates.
It was also noticeable that this school had little belief in setting cover. This is singularly imprudent in a situation where you have recruited a non-specialist (as an English specialist obviously I was teaching maths), but it turns out they have difficulty in getting any teachers at all. How can a school which does not put a subject specialist in front of every class in the core curriculum for over 95% of the timetabled classes should pass Ofsted?
How can a school which has had either a core curriculum member of staff off sick for over a year (well, bar the day you have to go back to extend your sick leave), or which has not had a member of staff in post for timetabled lessons for months at a stretch, be deemed to be anything other than failing? And if it's failing, why not close it down?
Not because this would seriously challenge government's fascinating social experimentation in schools, surely? Throwing as it would a thousand odd kids, probably of the most problematic nature, onto the streets, or worse, into their parents' care, for the next stage of their education.
Frankly, most of the kids do not deserve this, but a significant minority do. I don't feel that the presence of the 12-year-old girl who sat on the desk making remarks about my clothes, asking if I spit or swallow, refusing the leave the room and telling me she didn't have to pay me any respect was doing anything but setting a bad example and being allowed to do so. The only point to her presence was destructive. The best thing for all concerned would have been to remove her and to exclude her until she agreed to behave reasonably.
No Ofsted inspection would ever see such a child. She would be headed off at the pass big style. But does it even need an inspection to see that such a school is in trouble? Analysis of the sick leave, payroll and timetable would tell most of the story. As for the rest; teachers utterly exhausted with abuse and lack of support, children wandering about at will, stones through windows during lesson time and kids confronting teachers who ask them to sit down at a desk or pick up their sandwich crusts - a day looking around would tell the rest.
Children who don't behave must be excluded; teachers who don't teach must be replaced, and until the government shut and up and fund this, they should be allowed to make no further tinkerings in the land of learning.
The government harps constantly on "teaching and learning", but it seems that this is not what Ofsted inspects. If not, why not? Is it because the government doesn't know what it's doing, or is it because they cannot tell the truth about their agenda for schools? Because surely the push against truancy has as much to do with keeping potential Artful Dodgers under adult supervision as it does with "raising standards"; and the amount of social work now undertaken in school time and/or using school as the first stop seems steadily rising.
Furthermore, Ofsted's hands are pretty much tied in the case of schools that are clearly succeeding. Where exam results exceed 70% A*-C they cannot find too much fault, even if the whole school does nothing but sit at desks copying all day, every day. It is the weaker schools - those "failing" - which are most vulnerable to Ofsted meddling. Shame it doesn't meddle with the right things.
I spent last week teaching in an academy. Academy, of course, is the Newspeak term for a school so bad that it would have been closed down had not some bright spark decided that changing its name to something derived from the Greek would surely revolutionise its intake, culture and results - presumably in that order.
Judging by what I found this revolution is taking some time. Much of the school suffered from being permanently locked. The children expressed their feelings about this on my third day by entirely removing the lock of a classroom, which then locked us in, necessitating emergency calls to the switchboard for repairs. Interestingly, they were thrilled to be locked in, which was particularly strange because it was very much the norm for children to leave lessons at will, sometimes to call on other classrooms, sometimes to return, disappointed with the corridors, sometimes to vanish into the ether. Although there were great legions of the damned sweeping the corridors in search of errant children, they were seldom returned, though by the end of any lesson there were usually a couple of little faces at the windows of the door making sign-language at the inmates.
It was also noticeable that this school had little belief in setting cover. This is singularly imprudent in a situation where you have recruited a non-specialist (as an English specialist obviously I was teaching maths), but it turns out they have difficulty in getting any teachers at all. How can a school which does not put a subject specialist in front of every class in the core curriculum for over 95% of the timetabled classes should pass Ofsted?
How can a school which has had either a core curriculum member of staff off sick for over a year (well, bar the day you have to go back to extend your sick leave), or which has not had a member of staff in post for timetabled lessons for months at a stretch, be deemed to be anything other than failing? And if it's failing, why not close it down?
Not because this would seriously challenge government's fascinating social experimentation in schools, surely? Throwing as it would a thousand odd kids, probably of the most problematic nature, onto the streets, or worse, into their parents' care, for the next stage of their education.
Frankly, most of the kids do not deserve this, but a significant minority do. I don't feel that the presence of the 12-year-old girl who sat on the desk making remarks about my clothes, asking if I spit or swallow, refusing the leave the room and telling me she didn't have to pay me any respect was doing anything but setting a bad example and being allowed to do so. The only point to her presence was destructive. The best thing for all concerned would have been to remove her and to exclude her until she agreed to behave reasonably.
No Ofsted inspection would ever see such a child. She would be headed off at the pass big style. But does it even need an inspection to see that such a school is in trouble? Analysis of the sick leave, payroll and timetable would tell most of the story. As for the rest; teachers utterly exhausted with abuse and lack of support, children wandering about at will, stones through windows during lesson time and kids confronting teachers who ask them to sit down at a desk or pick up their sandwich crusts - a day looking around would tell the rest.
Children who don't behave must be excluded; teachers who don't teach must be replaced, and until the government shut and up and fund this, they should be allowed to make no further tinkerings in the land of learning.
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