Teachers' Standards

Usually I get nervous when I receive an email from the head, but this one appeared to be pretty safe as it contained an attachment of the latest document published by the Department of Education entitled "Teachers' Standards".

What an interesting read it is too, albeit most of it fairly obvious and what you'd expect to be honest. It has probably taken a huge amount of time and money to produce when there was a similar thing around before called the Core Standards.

There are a couple of interesting bullet points mind, and I shall review them below.

The very first bullet point says the teacher should "establish a safe and stimulating environment for pupils, rooted in mutual respect". The first bit is fine, if a little rose-tinted as not everything on the curriculum (a curriculum that the government wrote, or their minnions did at least), The final bit does make me laugh a little. I presume that the children will all be informed of this mutual respect thing. Respect is a two-way thing after all.

It reminds me of a time when I taught one of a set of triplets who liked to disrupt every lesson he was in and that meant me (as well as his other teachers) constantly trying to chivvy him along, asking him not to disturb the rest of the class and inform him that he lacked respect for his classmates who were trying to learn and was therefore quite selfish. It resulted in him standing up in the middle of the class and shouting "I hate you", to which I replied "I reckon I'll sleep tonight". At that point everyone (bar me, I hasten to add) laughed at him and he ran out, never to be seen again. It meant everyone else having a chance of actually passing. There's no way that you can convince me that he would ever show respect to anyone, let alone any of his teachers, to whom he clearly felt some sort of pre-conceived revulsion, for no apparent reason.

That point could be interesting to enforce.

The other part of the Teachers' Standards document that made be laugh/despair was the bullet point that says teachers should "be accountable for pupils' attainment, progress and outcomes". I've always struggled with this accountability thing that politicians go on about. The one major issue I have with it is that the outcome isn't entirely down to the teacher; the children have quite a lot to do with their final results through paying attention, making an effort, revising, and many other things that would contribute to their eventual success. Strangely enough the pupils' role in this isn't mentioned. This appears to be a fairly common theme in the public sector at the moment.

The rest of the document is the usual standard, wishy-washy tripe so often spewed from Whitehall, of the "act decisively when necessary" ilk. The document itself is yet another stick to clobber a teacher with when they have fallen out of management's favour and once again fails to give youngsters any responsibility for actions, choosing to blame teachers for things out of their control.

I eagerly await the publication of the "Parents and Childrens' Standards" document. It should be an entertaining read.