The Problem With Top Graduates...

The government has been on about attracting more top graduates into teaching for a while now. They've offered bursaries (see here), expanded the remit of the teaching recruitment charity Teach First to allow it to recruit greater numbers (see here), and made various announcements that have been lapped up by the media of varying quality (Telegraph, Independent, Mirror, Daily Mail to link just a few). A simple search online will unearth hundreds more articles I have no doubt, if you can be bothered that is.

The requirement to actually have a qualification to teach in the state schools of England has been relaxed in the most favoured types of school for the Department for Education, namely academies and free schools. The qualification requirement has never been compulsory in private/public schools, the type of school that a high proportion of MPs attended, or in the case of my local MP, wish they'd attended. Now you may say that if it's worked in private and public schools, what's the problem? They get great results that state schools could get after all. It's a question of intake, student motivation and support from home that is a major difference my friends. Anyway, that's a separate point; what I wanted to cover is the myth regarding top graduates.

There are a few subjects that have been highlighted by DfE ministers and other MPs on programmes like Question Time that really ought to have top graduates teaching the youth of today; namely mathematics and science. You could throw "new subject" computer science into that mix too, as you are either very good at it and therefore probably did it at university; there is no middle ground with computer science: either you're brilliant or you're crap. I'm the latter.

At A Level and Degree I couldn't agree more that maths and science could do with being taught by top graduates, although they need not be the be all and end all. Teaching of those courses is to children who have chosen to take those subjects and already have an deep-seated interest in the subject. They not only want to know how to do something, they want to know why it works that way; something that a top graduate can explain with ease, whilst others would possibly have to do a little research. So, dear DfE and those in expensive suits in Westminster, feel free to attract top graduates for those posts, but don't disregard others. You will have to dangle numerous carrots in front of these high flyers to divert their attention from the lucrative careers that top mathematicians and scientists have traditionally entered. It might help if DfE press releases and various Ofsted employees didn't consistently criticise teachers in the media too. I digress again...

My main query is whether a top graduate really is the best type of person to teach maths and science to disinterested children who have no choice but to be there and just want to get the minimum grade in order to never have to sit through a lesson again? Unfortunately with a total lack of interest in the subject, the likelihood of achieving that grade is minimal. These students need to be taught in a different way. Empathy with the inability to understand a concept first time around is hugely helpful. A top graduate in their subject will invariably have found most, if not all of their subject pretty straightforward. The trouble is this means that our much lauded top graduates will get increasingly frustrated as their charges fail to grasp covalent bonds or simultaneous equations. A teacher who was not a top graduate probably won't have found everything easy, and can therefore understand the frustrations.

If you couple this lack of empathy for a  student's woes with a lack of any teacher training or qualification then the recipe is potentially disastrous. If there's one thing that my PGCE did teach me it was different strategies for dealing with classes, mainly through teaching placements admittedly, but without it I would have floundered even more than I actually did in my NQT year.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that top graduates couldn't empathise, they are just less likely to understand. So Mr Gove, DfE, Sir Michael and the various other political types who drone on and on about top graduates, they may not actually be the answer to all your problems!

Behaviour Policies

Frustration is at the heart of many a teacher's day. It can manifest itself in many ways:

1. The kids won't listen and aren't taking their education as seriously as they should.
2. There aren't enough hours in the day to do the various tasks you have to do as a teacher.
3. The photocopier's broken and you need a class set of worksheets.
4. Your computer crashes in the middle of an observation.

There are many frustrating issues that go along with being teacher, and probably most jobs in fairness, but my main frustration has to be exclusive to educators:

How some kids essentially get away with everything: doing no work, being rude, smoking, swearing at staff, the list goes on.

Take an example from last week of a child who is regularly in trouble with the police for offences such as burglary, drug dealing, theft in general and wagging school. His home life is extremely settled, or should I say, should be extremely settled. This child's parents have applied for the child to be taken into care because of the carnage that surrounds their every move. This student, whom I attempt to teach when they are there, last week went nose-to-nose with me and called me a "fucking idiot" whilst I was on duty only to go on and threaten a colleague of mine, warning them to watch their back as you never know what might happen.

Both myself and my colleague wrote the incident up, but bright as a button, the student strolls into my lesson the next day. This student doesn't intimidate me in any way, although perhaps that's pretty foolhardy of me considering some of the people they hang around with, and this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. The student clearly feels that they can do what they want, when they want. In fact they threatened another member of staff a day or so later. Nothing's happened.

Not only is this absolutely shocking, but when you see normally nice kids make a mistake or lose their temper and get the full rule book lobbed in their general direction, receiving time in isolation and phone calls home to explain to their parents just how naughty they've been, it makes me wonder why every child isn't misbehaving more. The more you do, the more untouchable you seem to become.

I'm not saying that schools should be excluding every child who sneezes in the wrong part of the corridor, but unless there are consequences for those who misbehave, where's the incentive to toe the line? The government (no surprise there) has made it almost impossible for schools to exclude, although they will obviously claim otherwise. If a school does exclude, it still has to pay for their education. In a climate of decreasing budgets this is not an option for many schools.