Teaching's s**t: If management don't get you, Gove/Wilshaw will

Thinking about becoming a teacher? Don't, no really, don't.

Someone once said to me that teaching, policing and nursing will always be in demand, and they were right as there will always be children in need of education, criminals and sick people. The trouble is that in the UK it really isn't worth the grief now.

Government interference is at an all-time high in education. New initiatives from the Secretary of State for Education arrive ona weekly basis via the press in the same breath as "teachers are rubbish". It's the same in the police and health service. The public can only go by what they are told, via the press, and if a teacher dares to speak up they face reprimand and possible loss of employment.

League tables place increasing pressures on management in schools who pass that pressure onto teachers who are faced with an increasingly apathetic bunch of "learners". Parents, having read in the press that teachers are rubish, then blame teachers and schools for all their own failings and the cycle spirals out of control.

Teachers are expected to teach children not only their subject specialism but manners and also provide nutrition for their class. Ok, so they are not expected to feed their charges, but 16% admitted to buying some of them breakfast every month. With little or no parental support becoming increasingly the norm, how can standards be raised? I don't care what you say, but teaching does not pay well enough to burden its practitioners with the responsibility that society increasingly seems to expect. Politicians do anything but help in this matter by making repeated soundbites to achieve headlines that bear no resemblance to the reality.

And then we get to Ofsted, the "independent" regulator of teaching. Everyone knows that it is far from independent, considering that its leader is one of the Secretary of State's pals. Inspection teams take a snapshot of practise within a school and more often than not tell them that they are not doing well enough, placing the teachers in that school under increasing pressure to make silk purses from sow's ears.

Teaching is being held together as a profession by those decent practitioners who would love to get out but can't because they have hit a financial point where they couldn't afford the drop in wages to change career. The private industry grass is not always greener, we all know that, but there is the potential to earn a better living for the same pressure/stress.

I vowed after the first couple of years of my teaching career to do all my school work at school and take nothing home. I arrived at 7.30am and left at around 5.30pm and managed to keep this promise to myself and my family. Over the past 6 months I am regularly work in the evening despite keeping similar hours at school, and I know that I'm no the only one. For the privilege of having no life outside of teaching I am paid just the princely sum of around £35,000 and can just about afford the mortgage on a reasonably sized three bedroom house. I'm not moaning about my wage as I knew exactly what I was going to be paid when I started, but I didn't sign up for 15 hour days, a constantly reducing pension and a pay packet that shrinks every month due to it having been frozen for a significant amount of time.

Pressure is not an issue if I'm being paid enough to wear it, however, I'm no longer paid enough to wear the consistent barrage of abuse I get from management, Gove and Wilshaw as well as parents who want to know why I'm not doing their job for them too.

I repeat, don't even think about it. Empty bins, flip burgers, do anything other than teach because the cons so outweigh the pros now, it's really not worth it.

Cardinal Sin

I'm not sure that I can sleep tonight - I actually went into school today. It's the holidays and we only get 13 weeks per year. Ok, so 13 weeks per year is great, don't get me wrong, but I am genuinely disappointed in myself for going in.

Why?

I think it's important to keep home/holidays totally free from work. During term I arrive at work at about 7.45am and leave at about 5pm. Put your small violins away because it's not sympathy I want, but I feel that I work hard enough for the money I'm paid, and a work/life balance is important. As a result I don't like to bring work home, I want to spend time with my family like most others would want to. The trouble was that I had a test to mark and other stuff to do, so I spent around 2-3 hours in school today. Fortunately my wife and child are away at the moment so it was only me I was putting out, but that's not the point.

The work/life balance was something that unions, government and anyone else that doesn't really matter were going on about relentlessly not so long ago. That's all changed with the arrival of a new government and a new Chief Inspector of Schools. Teachers should be grateful to have a job apparently (Michael Gove did actually say that), and the pressure to produce data that shows how wonderful you are as a classroom practitioner has increased hugely.

Is this a healthy situation? The answer is a resounding "No". All that will happen is that schools will be full of teachers who are too tired to do a proper job, a job they could do if they were not so tired. Term time pressure is huge, with the marking of books (I'll get onto that in a bit) and planning so-called "outstanding" lessons - "outstanding" in whose eyes? By the end of a half term the staff room is exceptionally quiet, either with a lack of numbers (staff planning in their classroom) or due to exhaustion of those in there at the time.

Marking books is a total waste of a lot of a teacher's time other than to show the students that you do actually look at what they are doing in class. We are supposed to write formative comments for every student, comments that inform them of what they need to do to move to the next level. This is fine, but very few students actually bother to read the comments written by their teacher, instead wanting to know what level/grade they are currently at. It is a similar thing to a teacher and their lesson observation feedback. Observations were supposed to help teachers improve their practice but due to the increasing influence and power of Ofsted, all a teacher's worried about is their grade. This is not healthy!

I thought that once I'd become a little more experienced I could live without taking books or planning at home. The opposite seems to be the case, as I now go in when I don't have to be there far more than I use to. I can't believe that I'm the only one either - no wonder that teachers' morale is at an all time low. Not that that bothers Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Schools or Head of Ofsted in layman's terms, as he regards this as a sign that he is doing something right.

It depends what his objectives are (I presume it's written on the board, I'm too tired to see), if they are to force loads of teachers to leave the profession through various means, he's spot on and I offer him my congratulations.

Otherwise, he's an arse.