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.
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