... 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.
Saturday, 9 February 2008
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.
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
The Trouble with Teaching
There are many troubles with teaching; one being that it is unbelievably wearing, so that it is almost impossible to continue to do it over a number of years without being broken on the wheel of stressful inevitability.
In this, it sadly varies little from many, many jobs; 40 years of explaining to patients that they would be less ill if they smoked less and ate fewer McDonalds can't be much better, and spending that amount of time trying to stop parents beating their kids to death, or plodding gloomily after a bunch of thick but relentless miscreants who spray their names on walls in VERY BIG LETTERS just outside their tower blocks on breaks in between stealing electrical goods to pay for £10 drug bags must be equally depressing and demoralising.
What these jobs have in common, unlike working in the media, or in government, or even the high end of private practice, is that they are proper jobs, on the front line of "services", where you genuinely interact with the unfiltered public. The unfiltered public have not been pre-selected in any way; they are not particularly anything - except perhaps not the super-rich. It is rare to encounter Madonna's kids down the social. There is not much wrong with the unfiltered public per se, although a quantity of them are people that you just don't want to know exist, because most of the detectably bad are in the 90% of the population who aren't super-rich, and because (let's face it) nobody likes everybody they ever meet, and the odds of your enjoying their company is curtailed a lot by the fact that everybody you meet at work wants something from you. When you meet 180 of these a day who are short and shrill, plus a few members of staff, a couple of phone calls from parents, and the posse who want their homework back early or have been away and now demand you Help Them, you can feel quite tired by three o'clock.
And this is where teaching scores heavily on the "I'm fucking TIRED now, actually" o-meter. In order to survive, you must be able to ignore at least two classfuls of children a day. The other way lies madness. This is not what parents probably want to hear, but I doubt if they would like the alternatives better; for either there would have to be more money for schools (something some schools have done by directly charging a "voluntary contribution, which actually works well), or there would have to be and end to Equal Rights for the bone idle and disruptive - ie kicking out the kids who shriek, eat biscuits and text each other in class.
Meanwhile, the unions do not help matters by assisting the bone idle and disruptive among staff - those who take months off sick with very dubious excuses - to get great severance pay-offs, while doing little or nothing to protect the staff who are working, either from basic over-work, or from picking up the slack of their less conscientious colleagues. Again, there have always been work-shy lead-swinging skivaholic slackers, but that doesn't make it a good idea to encourage it.
Those foolish enough to carry on turning up to work are constantly expected to Do More and Do It Better, while having little time to do so because they are having to monitor their own performance in triplicate so that they can be told whether they are meeting the immeasurable targets set for them by people who know little or nothing of life at the chalk-face.
For this is the worst thing about teaching; you are Beta. Other people know better, and your rights are non-existent; you belong to the class to whom our society entrusts its children. Think about it.
In this, it sadly varies little from many, many jobs; 40 years of explaining to patients that they would be less ill if they smoked less and ate fewer McDonalds can't be much better, and spending that amount of time trying to stop parents beating their kids to death, or plodding gloomily after a bunch of thick but relentless miscreants who spray their names on walls in VERY BIG LETTERS just outside their tower blocks on breaks in between stealing electrical goods to pay for £10 drug bags must be equally depressing and demoralising.
What these jobs have in common, unlike working in the media, or in government, or even the high end of private practice, is that they are proper jobs, on the front line of "services", where you genuinely interact with the unfiltered public. The unfiltered public have not been pre-selected in any way; they are not particularly anything - except perhaps not the super-rich. It is rare to encounter Madonna's kids down the social. There is not much wrong with the unfiltered public per se, although a quantity of them are people that you just don't want to know exist, because most of the detectably bad are in the 90% of the population who aren't super-rich, and because (let's face it) nobody likes everybody they ever meet, and the odds of your enjoying their company is curtailed a lot by the fact that everybody you meet at work wants something from you. When you meet 180 of these a day who are short and shrill, plus a few members of staff, a couple of phone calls from parents, and the posse who want their homework back early or have been away and now demand you Help Them, you can feel quite tired by three o'clock.
And this is where teaching scores heavily on the "I'm fucking TIRED now, actually" o-meter. In order to survive, you must be able to ignore at least two classfuls of children a day. The other way lies madness. This is not what parents probably want to hear, but I doubt if they would like the alternatives better; for either there would have to be more money for schools (something some schools have done by directly charging a "voluntary contribution, which actually works well), or there would have to be and end to Equal Rights for the bone idle and disruptive - ie kicking out the kids who shriek, eat biscuits and text each other in class.
Meanwhile, the unions do not help matters by assisting the bone idle and disruptive among staff - those who take months off sick with very dubious excuses - to get great severance pay-offs, while doing little or nothing to protect the staff who are working, either from basic over-work, or from picking up the slack of their less conscientious colleagues. Again, there have always been work-shy lead-swinging skivaholic slackers, but that doesn't make it a good idea to encourage it.
Those foolish enough to carry on turning up to work are constantly expected to Do More and Do It Better, while having little time to do so because they are having to monitor their own performance in triplicate so that they can be told whether they are meeting the immeasurable targets set for them by people who know little or nothing of life at the chalk-face.
For this is the worst thing about teaching; you are Beta. Other people know better, and your rights are non-existent; you belong to the class to whom our society entrusts its children. Think about it.
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Brand New Teach
Why is teaching not getting any better? What proves that it isn't getting any better? And what is Anybody Doing About It?
Here are some statistics to crunch:
teachers are paid for 1296 hours a year. Last year I worked a full year as a teacher, and this was deemed to be a total of 38 weeks, or 190 days. suggesting that a teacher's working day is 6.82 hours long. Considering that such a stretch would include a mandatory paid break of 20 minutes, this seems about right. A teacher's working day at the school where I performed my duties began at 0820 and ended at 1520. Again, it all seems all right.
Except that: between 0820 and 1520, the vast majority of teachers' time is actually "contact time" - ie time spent with children, either pedagogically or pastorally. Well, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be? Good.
Now, let's add on:
1 meeting (after school) per week - 1 hour (faculty, staff, pastoral teams)
2 sessions of marking per week - 2 hours
5 hours per week planning
2 hours per week filling in register returns / telephoning parents about their pastoral concerns / chasing children for their errant behaviour or note return
10-12 parents' evenings per year @ 4 hours a pop
Media showcase - 1 evening attendance 4 hours
School play - 4 hours a night for 4 night, plus two or three four hour days (weekends)
1 detention per week - 40 minutes
Report writing - 2 for each form taught, at 2-3 hours each (10-15 hours min; 15-20 max)
Departmental Evenings - two per year, 4 hours each
Year 11 ball - attendance from 7pm to 2am
Moderation: 2 meetings, 2 hours each - 2 hours preparation per meeting
Checking administrative errors - 20 minutes per report-writing
Photocopying - 10 minutes a day
Pity the poor NQT who has no lessons planned, no foreknowledge of events and whole school deadlines, and no time off at all, because s/he has to go to extra meetings. The one I currently see is working from 0730, when she arrives in the morning, until 1730 when she leaves. On this basis, she will have completed her yearly hours in April - much good will it do her. She will still have to work until about 24th July.
She will still have to put up with parents who will not accept that their kids are Bone Lazy Idle Skivabouts, or that they themselves have driven their kids to near-nervous breakdown in the short time they've had, and are making things worse not better. She will still have to put up with kids who swear, have paddywacks, and make utter tossers of themselves and victims of other kids. She will still have to listen to assessments of her teaching by people who don't teach her subject, and have no idea what her working life consists of, because that is how NQT assessment works.
She is at a good school, where expectations of staff are not out of line with government directives. The majority of both staff and children - and indeed, parents - there are kind, polite and decent. She is a good teacher. But why isn't it any better? Why do teachers disappear with stress for half years at a time? How much more of what we aren't prepared to pay the poor bastards for do we expect to get? I was shocked to read in Private Eye that a Healthcare Trust had asked its nurses to work an unpaid shift to help balance the books. But when you think that Miss Smith will be working from April to July for free, it seems that that's what public service is about.
Here are some statistics to crunch:
teachers are paid for 1296 hours a year. Last year I worked a full year as a teacher, and this was deemed to be a total of 38 weeks, or 190 days. suggesting that a teacher's working day is 6.82 hours long. Considering that such a stretch would include a mandatory paid break of 20 minutes, this seems about right. A teacher's working day at the school where I performed my duties began at 0820 and ended at 1520. Again, it all seems all right.
Except that: between 0820 and 1520, the vast majority of teachers' time is actually "contact time" - ie time spent with children, either pedagogically or pastorally. Well, isn't that what teaching is supposed to be? Good.
Now, let's add on:
1 meeting (after school) per week - 1 hour (faculty, staff, pastoral teams)
2 sessions of marking per week - 2 hours
5 hours per week planning
2 hours per week filling in register returns / telephoning parents about their pastoral concerns / chasing children for their errant behaviour or note return
10-12 parents' evenings per year @ 4 hours a pop
Media showcase - 1 evening attendance 4 hours
School play - 4 hours a night for 4 night, plus two or three four hour days (weekends)
1 detention per week - 40 minutes
Report writing - 2 for each form taught, at 2-3 hours each (10-15 hours min; 15-20 max)
Departmental Evenings - two per year, 4 hours each
Year 11 ball - attendance from 7pm to 2am
Moderation: 2 meetings, 2 hours each - 2 hours preparation per meeting
Checking administrative errors - 20 minutes per report-writing
Photocopying - 10 minutes a day
Pity the poor NQT who has no lessons planned, no foreknowledge of events and whole school deadlines, and no time off at all, because s/he has to go to extra meetings. The one I currently see is working from 0730, when she arrives in the morning, until 1730 when she leaves. On this basis, she will have completed her yearly hours in April - much good will it do her. She will still have to work until about 24th July.
She will still have to put up with parents who will not accept that their kids are Bone Lazy Idle Skivabouts, or that they themselves have driven their kids to near-nervous breakdown in the short time they've had, and are making things worse not better. She will still have to put up with kids who swear, have paddywacks, and make utter tossers of themselves and victims of other kids. She will still have to listen to assessments of her teaching by people who don't teach her subject, and have no idea what her working life consists of, because that is how NQT assessment works.
She is at a good school, where expectations of staff are not out of line with government directives. The majority of both staff and children - and indeed, parents - there are kind, polite and decent. She is a good teacher. But why isn't it any better? Why do teachers disappear with stress for half years at a time? How much more of what we aren't prepared to pay the poor bastards for do we expect to get? I was shocked to read in Private Eye that a Healthcare Trust had asked its nurses to work an unpaid shift to help balance the books. But when you think that Miss Smith will be working from April to July for free, it seems that that's what public service is about.
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