Ambitious British Youngsters

I saw a news item on the BBC Breakfast show the other day about the ambition of British children. They had five children who had moved to Britain from other countries and they were asked about the British youngsters’ drive to succeed. It was quite interesting to see the opinions of those children.

There was a very polite, well spoken French girl who essentially said that she thought British children had dreams but were very laid back about achieving them. Two things immediately went through my head:

1.       Wow! She speaks extremely good English, in fact better than a lot of English kids. Would most English children be able to give such a lucid interview in French?

2.       She’s being extremely polite, and doesn’t want to offend anyone. What she really wanted to say was “British kids can’t be bothered – they want lots of money and a great job, but aren’t prepared to get off their backsides and do anything about it.

There then followed an interview with a fat bearded man from Ofsted whose view was this:

“I believe that children in Britain have ambition, but schools don’t give them belief in themselves.”

At this point the air went blue. This bloke’s supposed to be leading and monitoring improvement in British education but all he is capable of doing is whacking teachers over the head for something they can do little about, i.e. the laziness of the current generation of school children.

There has been lots of talk recently about the people constantly putting the attitude of young people in this country down. I hate to use a cliché at this point, but there’s no smoke without fire. Maybe the young people of this country deserve to be talked about in that way (I nearly said “put down”, but that would be a bit harsh). Laziness can’t be applied to all young people in the country, but a significant percentage allow the cap to fit.

And why don’t people feel sorry for teachers having to deal with the daily apathy? Loads of people say to me upon hearing that I’m a teacher “I couldn’t do that job”, but are quite happy to defend their lazy offspring to hilt in the next breath. If I had a pound every time I heard “I don’t care whether I get maths GCSE” I wouldn’t be in the classroom anymore; I’d have bought my own island in the sun and would be sticking two fingers up at the educational profession.

I’m still doing the lottery, but am now buying twice as many tickets.

Sanctions In School (Or Lack Thereof)

As everyone knows, in order to do something you’re not sure that you want to do, you need incentive. At school as a student that incentive is that you will get to keep all your free time and be able to remain on role at that school.

Let’s be honest, if you had the choice, would you do homework or classwork? I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t, but I’m beyond school age, have a load of qualifications (many of which are of little use, but could be if I changed career) and have little desire to gain any more than I already have.

For children under the age of 16 in the UK, you have no choice: you have to go to school/gain an education. It’s been the law for a while now, so I’m not telling you anything new. There will always be some young people who seem to feel that school is not really relevant to them, but as the law makes them go and they don’t want to get their mum/dad/carer a fine (a fairly common excuse for people who don’t want to be at school but attend) they turn up and just ruin anyone else’s chances of gaining an education.

In previous eras these young people would have been either sent to a special school that would be able to cater for their individual needs or they would have be excluded and given another chance to prove their educational worth at another school, and perhaps eventually a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU).

For those that couldn’t toe the line, there was always the threat of them being ejected from that school althogether. Special schools have been closed on economic grounds, but under the umbrella of the “Inclusion Policy” by successive governments (it doesn’t matter what colour your rosette is, you are as bad as each other I’m afraid). PRUs are scarce and have very few places available.

From the next academic year (September 2011) though, very few schools will be able to afford to permanently exclude students because if they do, they will have to pay for that student’s education at a different establishment, which is extremely expensive, if not prohibitively so. So that removes the final real threat that any state funded school had, and schools will have to provide those students who cannot behave like a civilised human being with an alternative arrangement within that establishment, where they’ll still be able to see their mates and disrupt other student’s learning.

Do politicians lose all common sense upon election to parliament?

As an ordinary teacher, I can essentially do nothing. I can set a detention during school time, but they have to be allowed to have 5 minutes of a break to go to the toilet/at something/smoke a cigarette or whatever else they can think of that could be construed as an infringement of human rights (rightly or wrongly). If I want to keep someone after school for more than 30 minutes (although most schools work a 15 minute rule) then I have to get permission from the parent/carer normally 24 hours in advance. That’s all fine, but many of the students you’d like to detain won’t turn up, will walk out or have parents who hated school in the first place and won’t “allow” their child to be detained. I am not allowed to shout at them in case they feel “intimidated” (30 students aren’t intimidating at all, are they?) and obviously can’t manhandle them even if I wanted to, so that’s me pretty much out of options.

And so it moves up the food chain. Middle management can get a child internally excluded, in other words, put in a supervised area of the school away from all their mates, but the next day they will be back. And with the greatest respect to internal exclusion areas (the staff are great but have no real work to offer the students, because the students were sent with none in the first place), the students may not be able to socialise but they have little to do other than surf the internet in many cases, which isn’t a huge punishment. The internal exclusion facility is usually already full of nice kids who dyed their hair the wrong colour or wore the wrong type of socks that day anyway, depending upon what the senior management’s latest “crackdown” is.

An incident occasionally ends up at the top table, with assistant or deputy heads (headteachers rarely get involved in this stuff for whatever reason you can think of, but usually because they can’t be bothered or don’t have the bottle) who then had the power to externally exclude (send unruly students home for a period of days). This is the thing that has now been fiscally prohibited by those wonderful people in Whitehall.

What this new policy is essentially saying is this:

“Do what you like in school kids, because there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do to punish you for it.” And I’m sure they will.

Fortunately most young people can behave, but their school lives are blighted, increasingly so, by total idiots who should be locked in a secure room until they can learn to be civilised. Without the threat of external exclusion there are no real consequences for actions, and therefore the unruly students will never learn to be civilised.

Teaching really is becoming an untenable career.

Extra Lesson Expectations

Teachers teach for around 25 hours per week, that’s 5 hours per day for the non-mathematicians out there. In maths, the subject I teach, they will receive approximately 3 hours of lessons per week, depending on the year group, plus would be expected to do some homework. It hasn’t changed since I was at school mainly because there are still 24 hours in a day, and human beings need to eat, sleep and relax at some point.

In the olden days, you got out what you put in, so if you listened to the teacher in class, had a good go at your homework and revised a bit for exams, you’d be fine in general. If you genuinely got stuck you’d ask a fellow classmate for help (some may have copied), or your parents, and as the ultimate last resort, your teacher. Asking for help outside of the classroom was considered a bit defeatist where I went to school, but I am willing to accept that other schools may have differed.

This could not be further from the case in modern education. I have been teaching for over 10 years and the sea change in attitudes towards extra lessons has been enormous. When I was wet behind the ears as a teacher, we put on extra lessons for students in the run up to their exams, which was about a month or so, for one hour per week.

League tables have been about for longer than I have been a teacher, but the pressure on schools and teachers to produce results is now far greater than it has ever been. Extra classes have become an expectation, not just in the run up to exams, but pretty much all through the academic year, and do bear in mind that we don’t get paid for the after-school sessions. A colleague of mine said to me “I don’t think one after-school session per week is asking too much”. They mean it from a good and caring point of view and they are not trying to force me into the extra classes, but the children are now so used to them, that they actually don’t really try very hard in class in the knowledge that they will get another opportunity to do the work or catch up the coursework. In fact, close to deadline day, students are removed from my class to catch up the project work they have failed to do in 2 years because the teacher needs them to get as close to the unrealistic target grade they have been set otherwise they will be dragged over the coals.

It’s a situation that really riles me. I am a firm believer in the “you get out what you put in” philosophy, and therefore have very little time for extra classes. I do them because otherwise I’d feel that I’d be letting my colleagues down (those in my department, not senior management), not that I’d be letting the students down if I didn’t offer my own free time. In my view, the students who need the extra lessons have often already let themselves down by failing to make any sort of effort in their timetabled lessons. That’s their problem, not mine.

You are reading this thinking that I’m totally heartless, I realise that. I would never turn away a student who came up to me and said “I’m really struggling in this area, could you help me out after school”, but those students are in the minority. Most students who turn up to the extra sessions just want you to re-teach the lesson they had talked through. In our department we won’t do that, and as a result, some students have moaned to senior staff, but we won’t be swayed – each child must be specific about what they want help with, they can’t just say “I don’t get any of it”.

It is therefore the fault of schools and mainly the league tables that so many young people can’t hold down a job upon leaving school. They can’t understand why their employer won’t give them infinite chances to succeed as their school had done.

At some point schools are going to have to bite the bullet and say to children:

“If you don’t hand in your coursework by this date, you won’t be entered for the exam, and there won’t be after-school sessions in which to catch up, meaning that you will have to listen in class”. It will never happen until the league table system is abolished, but until it does, the youth of today will continually fail to be able to help themselves. It’s a shame really, because the extra lessons were born out of the good will of teachers, although not heartless teachers like me obviously.

What They Don't Tell You About Teaching

When all those “wet behind the ears” student teachers bound into school on their teaching practises, a smile always crosses my lips. Before they enter the school environment they will have been fed with all the theory that they can eat from university lecturers who haven’t set foot in a school classroom for real for a number of years. They’ll be all enthusiastic about what activities they can try out on their classes and how they are going to make learning fun.

It is at that point they meet the classes they will teach. This doesn’t normally put them off, but does tend to give them a sense of trepidation. In our school we do try to give trainee teachers a range of classes – normally a top set, two middling sets and a bottom-ish set. It’s a similar type of timetable to what they would get as a qualified teacher, only half as many classes, because trainees only teach half a timetable, or maybe a little more.

Then there comes the teaching, or more accurately, the standing in front of 30 students truing to get them to do what you want. What they won’t tell you is the following:

·         You will spend a large proportion of your time asking students to stop chatting about Eastenders, X Factor, The Simpsons or whatever, and that includes the nice, bright classes.

·         Most lessons will see an argument of one sort or another, or one member of the class claim that they can’t be within 4 desks of so-and-so because they’ve fallen out.

·         Any activity that you’ve designed will require the instructions read out at least 3 times, and even then a few will do it totally wrong.

·         A significant percentage of the class will not have part of the equipment they require, be it their book or something to write with.

·         At least half the class will say “I don’t get it”, or words to that effect, before having read any of the questions. I had one boy today claim that he “didn’t get it” before I’d actually said anything.

I could go on, but you get the gist.

On top of the students’ inability to fall into the rose-tinted view of school life, there’s the government of the school to consider, whether it’s centrally or locally, there will always be people in power suits prepared to tell people what they should be doing having never actually performed the role themselves. There’ll be new directives on marking, how to structure a lesson or how to discipline (or not as is the case nowadays) students.

We haven’t even mentioned the parents yet. “My Johnny wouldn’t lie” or “I can’t believe Hayley would ever do that” and “Steven is not staying for a detention because he has to get me a pint of milk on the way home and I’m gasping for a cuppa”.

And finally, at the bottom, sorry top, of the pile is Ofsted: the fear inducing body of ex-teachers who can’t cut the mustard as real teachers any more, so they go around telling everyone else how to do it. The fear is only felt by Heads, Deputy Heads and other senior staff, and mostly you’ll find that ordinary teachers couldn’t care less about the £200 million per year quango, but it affects ordinary teachers, because in fits of panic, headteachers pressurise ordinary teachers into doing worthless tasks in a bid to raise there Ofsted judgement to as close to “Outstanding” as possible.

If you think you can handle all that then train to be a teacher. If you want a job where the general public respect you and you feel like you are making a contribution to society, then do something else. Except be a traffic warden of course.

Do you want to be a teacher?

They’ve started showing the “Become a teacher, it’s great” adverts again. I have always wondered what the budget for those was – it has to run into the tens of thousands of pounds I would have thought. The one I saw tonight was of the science lesson where the children, who are around the age of 13 or 14 are designing space ships using toy cars, clay and drinking straws, before putting them into a wind tunnel. The students are really enjoying themselves, or at least appear to be, although presumably the lesson is actually longer than the 45 seconds that we see.

There are others, like the one about planets in the playground where students mimic the orbits of the planets in our solar system and have a super time. Does anyone actually believe that lessons run like this? What do the children actually learn that they will be able to recall in an exam? Do these lessons just happen or have other lessons been used to set the activity up?

Within the science curriculum the students do have to learn about how “forces are interactions between objects and can affect their shape and motion”, which mean that the aerodynamics are relevant. They also have to learn about “astronomy and space science provide insight into the nature and observed motions of the sun, moon, stars, planets and other celestial bodies”, the playground lesson with the planets is also relevant.

The trouble is that these lessons are extraordinary or as Ofsted might put it, “outstanding”. You can’t teach every lesson in this way, because at some point the students will have to sit and answer some questions, like they would in exams. To have a lesson as “outstanding” would mean that it stands out from the crowd. If every lesson was of a similar ilk, no lesson would stand out, hence there would be no outstanding lessons.

There’s also the fact that all the student appear to be engaged, totally focused on the task set and not distracted in any way. “Accidents” are laughed at (I’m remembering when a student breaks a necklace and the beads go all over the place) and everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to do.

Teaching doesn’t work like this, so why do the government mislead potential teachers?

I have performed lesson along similar lines with mathematical concepts and have encountered the following problems:

·         The students are incapable of listening to instructions.

·         The students find what they regard as being a better way of performing the task, when in fact the task has been designed quite specifically to show certain things.

·         The class moan that the groups they’ve been put in contain people they don’t get on with or doesn’t contain their mates.

Activities like the ones seen on the teaching adverts are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but they take ages to set up (usually more than one lesson) and then are ruined or at least hindered by those who can’t help but mess about. I realise that the art of the teacher is to engage all of the students, but sometimes it’s nigh on impossible – just look at Jamie Oliver’s Dream School series on Channel 4 at the moment.

What the adverts fail to point out is that every day a teacher will spend around 90% of their time with 10% of their students – the ones who can’t behave for whatever reason, whether “medical”, “dietary” or whatever. The other 10% of the time has to be divided between the 90% who actually are trying to get something out of school.

I would never encourage anyone to become a teacher now. The pay is fine, but the working conditions are dreadful for various reasons that I’ll go into at another time. Most days are spent wondering what the point of your teaching existence is and getting more and more tired after increasing numbers of sleep deprived nights. The trouble is that once you’re in for a while, it seems very difficult to escape.

The holidays are alright though.