Gove Has Been Busy

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, is really earning his corn at the moment. There is barely a day that goes by when he doesn't come up with a new idea to "improve" education in the UK. But, stop press, because he's actually come up with a reasonable idea:

Unify all the exam boards at GCSE level to avoid "dumbing down" as the different exam boards attempt to get schools' business by setting easier papers and therefore better grades for your school.

This is a superb idea, and one that many teachers have been shouting about for a while. The fact is that in this results driven business, schools understandably shop around for the "easiest" board. They can't change every year because that would be too expensive, but every 10 years they can probably afford it, and this can't give employers a huge amount of confidence in the calibre of the potential recruits wandering through their doors with C grades oozing out of every orifice.

The problem is that Gove wants to take education back to the 1970s by reintroducing the O-Level and CSE system at the same time, which is a two-tier system, although apparently not in the opinion of the government who must have chosen an exceptionally easy Maths GCSE exam board as they clearly can't count to two. I'm not sure of the point of this policy - the GCSE would be fine once there was only one board. Also, those sitting the CSE will automatically know that they have been labelled as "thick", which is hardly a motivating factor for them.

Govestill  maintains that academy status is the way forward for schools, but continually fails to give any concrete reasons for this. The actual reason is that it is in order to save government money, and potentially allow schools, or the companies who run them, to make money out of education. Not even public schools like Eton and Harrow do this as they have charitable status and therefore are not allowed to make a profit - everything they get in has to be spent eventually. One year's surplus goes on improving facilities, as it should be. Academies do have feedom from the national curriculum though, which suggests that the government penned national curriculum is rubbish. But there's the other point here, all the kids have to take the same exams at the end of day, so there's no incentive to do that either. He neglects to mention that schools originally went for academy status because they got a golden handshake, but now there is no extra money.

What it boils down to is the following:

Michael Gove is a pompous arse with an unfathomable desire to turn back the educational clock 40 years, but every now and then one of his extensive, and probably expensive team of advisors has a reasonable idea.

Ofsted "Copy and Paste" Scandal

This article turned up on the BBC News website today: Click Here!

Now anybody in education, apart from perhaps many headteachers, will tell you that this is not a massive surprise. Ofsted often make their judgements before actually visiting a school. They are a political animal and will make judgements based upon government policy, despite Chief Inspector Wilshaw's apparent best intentions and statements that teaching is "Christ's work on Earth".

The "scandal" centres around two primary school reports from the same company to which Ofsted outsources inspections, Tribal. Both inspections were headed by the same person and due to the fact that some of the statements in the reports read exactly the same, there seems little doubt that laziness has crept in and a higher agenda has influenced the reports. In my local area an academy, which I know quite a lot about for one reason or another, has just received "outstanding" gradings in every category when it apparently deserves none. One has to bear in mind that government (and therefore Ofsted) are keen to make every school an academy, and with education being such a vote winner, political decisions are bound to be made by inspectors.

Ofsted inspectors are usually former headteachers who want an easy life and something to boost their pension pot, or they are failed educators who have "befriended" the right people. An Ofsted inspector is paid around £60,000 per year, a pay cut for most headteachers, but a wage that is far higher than those they inspect. This should mean that inspections are done properly and written from scratch every time.

What the report seems to imply is that the inspectors write the reports and make a judgement, but Ofsted central office re-words things to ensure that the wording fits the grading. This would also suggest that grading can be made whimsically by inspection teams and the words written to fit that grading. Hardly a robust system, I'm sure you'd agree.

Ofsted, and their Fuhrer, sorry, leader, are not fit for purpose, and nor are their bosses - the Department for Education. No educator has a problem with standards being checked so that they remain high, but the current system is essentially corrupt and worthless. Not to mention demoralising.

More Good News

There was an interesting article on the TES website regarding teacher suicides: click here to read

It says that in 2008 and 2009 the rate of teacher suicides went up by 80% according to the Office for National Statistics, with the number of teachers rising from 35 to 63 in 12 months. It doesn't sound that many (although you could argue that 1 is too many) and I'm sure that politicians would spin the information in that way, but the fact is that numbers are on the increase. Another article in the TES magazine concerning teacher suicide apparently amounted to a huge response from readers.

The Teacher Support Network has been increasingly busy in the last couple of years, with call numbers doubling between 2010 and 2011. Stories along the lines of the teacher who set themselves on fire due to exam result anxiety, the teacher who walked out of school one break and threw themselves under a bus, and various others.

So why is this? There are various thoughts in the article and in the comments below, but I thought I'd add my own.

Teachers have various sources of stress:

1. Workload - this can include merely planning lessons, although this becomes more problematic and time-consuming when being observed either internally by a line manager/colleague or by Ofsted. Whichever way it's being done, the lesson is judged based upon Ofsted's current ideals as to what makes a decent lesson and what doesn't. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the current fad is, and actually it's unlikely that Ofsted know themselves. Often, and this adds to teacher stress, the lesson is judged based upon the observer's own prejudices/pre-conceptions, so unless you are a carbon copy of the observer and in their good books, you will struggle to gain a decent grade whatever you do. It's happened to me on a couple of occasions in a couple of different schools, with the only justification for giving me satisfactory being "I didn't like the way you did it/I wouldn't have done it like that" rather than "you did it badly because...". This boils down to confusion in education as to what is good and what is not, and that is Ofsted/government's fault, bearing in mind that teachers' jobs depend on these lesson gradings. I am constantly hearing about teachers spending from 7.30am to 6pm at school and then doing more at home. If this is the case, and I have no reason to doubt the stories, then this is beyond the call of duty. The constant pressure to reinvent the wheel in order to make the curriculum more accessible and interesting for a more and more spoon fed generation.
2. Control/Behaviour - this is made all the worse when a school's leadership is weak or unsupportive. It also depends on the teacher, their personality, and often how long they have been at the school or what sort of reputation they have with the students. Public perception of teachers is at rock-bottom due to media representation of teachers as deviants (I can think of relatively recent Coronation Street and Hollyoaks storylines immediately, but I'm sure that there are more) alongside the seemingly constant belittling of the profession by members of the Department for Education.
3. Pay - teachers' pay should never have been moaned about by teachers as it's advertised so obviously. The problem is that with pay freezes and increased pension contributions, teachers may be finding it difficult to make ends meet - teachers now have something to moan about in the monetary sense. With the increased workload, there is less time to fit in any extra work, so no way to make up the shortfall.
4. Ofsted - an inspection was cited as the reason a headteacher killed themselves i  the article, and those in the profession would understand the stress placed upon all staff when the phone call comes.

Ultimately, teacher depression boils down to lack of support in teachers from various places: government Ofsted, parents (and therefore their children) and due to being told that teachers are lazy and incompetent by the others, the public in general.

Be a teacher - it's so rewarding.