From the mouths of babes...

It’s not that pleasant being a teacher at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, the holidays are great and the hours fit around the kids’ day nicely, but there is a rather sinister side to teaching that most parents/people who don’t work in schools, don’t realise happens.

I have said before that kids are getting increasingly savvy about their “rights” in school – they have a right to be treated equally and receive an education in a safe environment, without going into the lengthy legal mumbo jumbo of the Children’s Act etc. The problem is that some are manipulating the law in an attempt to get exactly what they want in school – namely not having to do certain lessons that they don’t like/deem relevant, and in the process making life very unpleasant for staff.

Let me give you an example:

A child decides that they don’t want to do “core” PE anymore. Core PE is a legal requirement for schools to provide a certain number of hours per week for student to expend some energy through physical activity. Some students aren’t overly keen on it, and there have always been students who don’t like PE. In the “olden days” students were just told to get on with it and stop whinging, sometimes in no uncertain terms by less than politically correct PE staff. I obviously don’t condone PE staff taking the Michael out of students to make them feel small – that can haunt someone for life and is essentially bullying. This rarely happens (in my experience) nowadays, but what is on the rise are situations like this:

Student: “PE is rubbish, I ain’t doing it anymore”.

PE Teacher: “I’m afraid you have to unless you have a medical note – sorry about that”.

Students: “That’s Ok, I’ll just get my parents to write a note in saying that I feel threatened by you and then I won’t have to do it”.

PE Teacher: “Where did that come from?”

It’s not just exclusive to PE, but happened to me the other when doing one of my 2 lessons per fortnight as our PE department is understaffed at certain times. A very similar thing happened to a maths colleague of mine recently. The students know that if a letter comes in, or even a comment from a pupil along the lines of:

“That teacher’s picking on me”.

“That teacher threatened me”.

“That teacher hit me”.

Etc.

The school are obliged to investigate, whether there is any truth or evidence to back the story up. More often than not there will be no letter from the parent, but the fact that the student’s made what they regard as a glib comment is a massive worry. A throw away comment could end someone’s career and therefore livelihood with out there being any evidence of such a thing having occurred.

The annoying thing is that the child who has been refusing to co-operate and should be punished has deflected all attention onto the innocent teacher and will get off scot-free in general.

Consequences for actions are not things that can be taught in schools now due to the only real sanction being a detention (that the child will probably refuse to attend), especially when parents believe every word that comes out of their child’s mouth.

And they wonder why there are so many young people unemployed (figures came out recently) – many young people haven’t learnt to essentially take orders, and whereas schools have to grin and bear it, employers don’t, with the minority of awkward young people giving the whole group a bad reputation.

Pensions, Pensions, Pensions

Do they really want to force everyone out of teaching. There have always been two major advantages to teaching as a career:

1. The holidays.
2. The pension.

If they tamper with the holidays there will be major unrest within the profession, so in a bid to save however many billion pounds, they are having a go at the pension. For the first time since the 1970s all the teaching unions are talking about a strike. Not only are they telling teachers that they are useless in various different ways (if other people want to attempt to do the job better, they are welcome to try) but they now want teachers to pay more towards their pension and receive less, or at best, the same at whatever age they are allowed to retire - at the current rate when teachers are about 102.

This is what happens when people who don't actually do the job anymore make decisions that those who do the job have to implement, normally against their better judgement.

Please don't think that this is a party political thing; it makes no difference what colour rosette the government wears, the results are still the same: worse conditions, higher (if not impossible) targets and more inspections from people who aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

The pension thing is just the tip of a very large iceburg, and I would put money on the fact that teachers will strike at some point very soon.

What fun - can't wait!

Do you know how he feels?

Good News For Current Qualified Teachers

Trainee teachers are a bit of a lottery - you never know who the university are going to send you. We've had a bit of a mixed bunch this year to be honest. The first cohort, before Christmas, were very good and will make excellent classroom practitioners.

The second cohort however was a different kettle of fish altogether. We had one who couldn't write on the board, another who ignored the class entirely and talked to themselves whilst facing the board, and an English trainee who couldn't read - I jest you not!

You'd have thought that all three would have failed, but "No". They are all able to qualify as teachers in the future for reasons beyond my comprehension: if they aren't good enough they should be failed. So perhaps the inability to allow people to fail goes beyond teaching children in schools.

To be honest just one look at these trainees should have told the universities that they weren't up to the job, but in today's market someone will take the money that comes with each trainee, so it might as well be them.

The moral of the story: don't believe the governement when they say that loads of people are training to be teachers, because even though numbers are reasonably high (although not as high as they used to be I believe), the standard of some is appalling. Quantity rather than quality seems to be the order of the day.

Incentives For Choosing The Teaching Profession

The retirement age is rising and pensions are dropping, although pension contributions are going up. Teachers have few powers to discipline effectively and targets for students are increasing at an unsustainable rate in a desperate bid to reach the government’s unrealistic targets.  Behaviour standards in schools around the country appear to be dropping as a result of the lack of disciplinary measures available to staff.

On top of that, anything that goes wrong in schools or education in general is blamed upon teachers due to the increasingly fashionable policy of “accountability”.

I’ve spoken to a lot of teachers recently about these very issues and many have arrived at the same conclusions:

·         If they (teachers) can get out, they will.

·         Staffrooms will end up being full of disgruntled teachers who can’t afford to lose their pensions, and will just be marking time until they can claim.

·         Schools will get more and more anarchic as there are no serious consequences for poor behaviour. This will ultimately lead to more unemployable young people to whom consequences are a new concept when they reach the workplace.

·         As far as “accountability” goes – when are parents going to be accountable for their offspring?

I also speak to non-teachers (yes we do occasionally have lives away from the classroom) who pretty much all, to a man/woman, say that they would never be able to be a teacher – “I wouldn’t have the patience” being the main excuse. That’s fair enough, not everyone can do the job, but someone’s got to do it otherwise we might as well go back to the Dark Ages and forget education altogether. So, assuming that we don’t want to go back to a time before electricity and the various luxuries we now take for granted, we need teachers to educate the young people of the world. So why do people keep knocking teachers, both in the pocket and professionally?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to ramble on about how hard-done-by we teachers are, because there are far worse ways to make a living, but I would suggest the following:

1.       Government minsters need to avoid having anything to do with curriculum and how it should be taught in the classroom. Government ministers do not stand in a classroom for 195 days per year and therefore have no idea what they are talking about. Their advisors are also out of touch as many of them no longer stand in a classroom, so therefore are in no position to advise in the first place. The only advisors worth listening to are those who are still full-time teachers.

2.       Ofsted needs to be abolished or at the very least reformed so that inspectors are still practising teachers rather than people who couldn’t hack it in the classroom so therefore sought solace in advising those who can still cut mustard. George Bernard Shaw once said “Those who can do, those who can’t teach”; I reckon you could just reword it for teaching to “Those who can do, those who can’t advise”.

3.       Stop giving teachers unrealistic targets. The way things are going all students will have to get a C grade at every GCSE subject they get, and let’s face it, it’s never realistically going to happen. At some point the central or local government have to accept that some young people just aren’t very academic. Also some students can plateau before reaching GCSE and therefore won’t get the target that was set for them when they were 11 years old, 5 years previously.

4.       Stop blaming teachers for things that they have little or no control over them. Teenage pregnancies aren’t exclusively down to a lack of education, although admittedly, sometimes that can be argued to a certain extent. Teenage binge drinking is also not down to a lack of education, but mainly down to the fact that the teenagers who do drink stay out extremely late and buy the stuff with money from either part-time jobs, or from their parents. Don’t their parents worry about where they are?

5.       Start blaming parents a bit more. I am a parent and if my child did something they shouldn’t have at school, I would discipline them, not tell the school that they need to sort themselves out. We live in a society that likes to find someone or something else to blame, and the number of parents or carers who blame their child’s teachers is on the rise in my experience. Face up to it – you created the child, take some responsibility. Along with this, parents really ought not to believe every word their child says. If the child knows that they’ve done wrong, they will embellish the truth – it’s a survival instinct. You also have to realise that in almost all cases the school gain nothing from lying about a child’s behaviour, so probably aren’t.

6.       Allow young people to fail at school. Due to league tables and all the other things that go hand-in-hand with them, schools have to extract their own teeth (metaphorically speaking) in an attempt to get their young people up to a grade that can be counted for those tables (C or above). Deadlines then disappear because students know that they can have infinite chances to finally do the work. Schools have to bite the bullet at some point and just fail kids, not keep giving them holiday, pre-school and post-school revision/catch-up sessions. Students will mess about in class because they know that they’ll get another chance in a teacher’s free time. Teachers should only be accountable to a certain extent, namely that they have delivered the entire syllabus to the best of their ability, no more.

7.       We all know that the economic climate is pretty gloomy, but freezing teachers’ pay and cutting their pension, but increasing contributions is hardly going to attract more into the profession. They had better hope that it gets worse and forces people into teaching because there is nothing, but then you’ll only get a load of unmotivated teachers who, as a result, won’t be much good.

Teaching has become extremely undesirable and dying profession. There is a crisis on the horizon, but I’m not convinced that anybody in power wants to admit the fact.