New Year, New Career?

As 2012 disappears and 2013 arrives it's a time for resolutions. And what will mine be this year?

This is my list of possibles:

1. Give up smoking.
2. Cut down on drinking.
3. Go on a diet.
4. Find a new job outside of teaching.

I'm sure that there are more, but these four immediately spring to mind.The one that should be easiest is number 3 as I have been building up to it since September, cutting various things out of my daily intake. The others are all linked though which makes them somewhat tougher but at the same time easier if one can be nailed down initially.

Why are numbers 1, 2 and 4 linked so closely? I actually gave up smoking in the middle of the summer and lasted until around October but found myself getting so annoyed with the apathy of students and demoralising edicts from government (Gove/Wilshaw, that means you two) that I started again. I realise that I was weak willed, but unfortunately I reverted back to smoking when I was at the end of my tether. A similar thing happened with the drinking, although I never gave up completely. I cut right down to less than half of what I been consuming on an average term time evening, but that has also slipped back into the old regime.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that teaching is bad for me and that I need a change. A colleague of mine said to me, knowing that I wasn't the happiest, that there was a job being advertised in the local sixth form college, to which I replied: "Why would I want to apply for that? Teaching's shit". And that is genuinely how I feel, but I didn't wlays feel like this, so why now?

There are a number of reasons, and they are below in no particular order, but in some cases are linked:

1. Teaching has become an exam factory, where league tables and results mean more than actually giving young people a proper education, the problem being that when young people leave school and go into the workplace they are not prepared and that means that business leaders say to the press that education in this country is rubbish and that's teachers' fault. It's not teachers' fault, it's the fact that exams results have become more important than imparting knowledge. With education the most popular political football, teachers get caught up in a slanging match between the political parties, where unqualified politicians with no experience of the things they are talking about and making policy on, come up with bright ideas about the system in an attempt to make their mark and move up the political ladder. Health has suffered similarly, it's just education's turn.
2. In order to justify the constant changes of policy to make his mark and ultimately become leader of the Conservative Party (he thinks, hopefully mistakenly, that he will be Prime Minister one day), Michael Gove has turned teaching upside down. Now don't get me wrong, not everything was rosy in the education garden before, with exam passes having become easier and easier under successive governments of different colours, but the way Gove has justified change (by rigging exam results for example) is beyond comprehension. The way he has forced schools into becoming academies by cutting their funding until they agree to convert is also scandalous and had it been done in a playground would be described as bullying. New policy is consistently controversial and never comes directly from the Department of Education but is leaked the the press on days when there are major news stories that will bury it.
3. As a result of the constant abuse from politicians and the negative news stories emanating from the DfE regarding teachers, the general public now feel empowered to criticise teachers. A colleague of mine told me that every weekend people phone him to literally abuse him about the school, teachers and anything else they want to get off their chest. This is simply not on and purely due to the constant statements from suits in Whitehall saying that teachers are rubbish.
4. And so we come on to Ofsted. Goalposts have been moved for right or wrong reasons, I sugest the latter. Wilshaw (I can't bring myself to give him his full title) was handpicked by Gove, and therefore one could suggest his puppet. All Ofsted's goalpost moving has played, unsurprisingly, into the hands of Gove who uses the findings of the inspectorate to impose his policies - the irony is not lost on me!
5. Ofsted bases their entire judgement of a school before they arrive at it, looking at exam results (notice we've gone back to these) which you may think is fair enough, but the judgement comes purely from targets that are generated by a computer program based upon where you live and what each child got in an exam 5 years previously. This target takes into account whether they are entitled to free school meals, but not their general attitude which changes hugely in that time. We were (un)lucky enough to have a visit from Ofsted recently and since we weren't told the grading, one has to assume that it wasn't very good! But they had made their mind up beforehand, and nothing they saw was going to change this, so why bother with the visit in the first place? What this will mean is increased pressure on staff and some being hounded out of the school, to be replaced by who? Not a good time for anyone.

Education has got its priorities all wrong, is putting undue stress on staff (whether teaching or non-teaching), and couple this with frozen pay (in reality a pay cut relatively speaking), the only thing that's keeping education in the UK afloat is the fact that we are in an economic downturn meaning that people are stuck. As economic recovery materialises you will find that more and more people seek their fortune in other areas. There's already a shortage of decent teachers according to politicians - this is not going to get better by demoralising those who are there and actually might be competent.

The pros of teaching (the holidays and ?) are now hugely outweighed by the cons (everything other than the holidays).

I must go and tidy up my CV...