Scenes From The Battleground

Form time. Not long ago.

“This is boring. I hate form time” said Ryan.

“It’s St George’s Day today” I replied, changing the subject.

“What?” asked Ryan, “Who’s St. George?”

“He’s the Patron Saint of England” replied Jade. “He fought a dragon”

“Here, let me put his Wikipedia page on the whiteboard” I said, “There you go, it says he is also the patron Saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Palestine, Portugal, and Russia,”

“This is boring” said Ryan.

“He was a Greek speaker but was born in a place that is now in Turkey” I said.

“Why don’t we have our own saint?” asked Holly.

“It’s typical” complained Julie. “We always have to put up with all these foreigners”.

Ibrahim and Mohsin look uncomfortable. Yusef doesn’t react as his English isn’t good enough to have picked up on what was said.

“I don’t think that’s terribly fair”, I said.

“Is he real?” said Holly.

A short conversation starts up quietly in the back of the room about whether dragons exist. Somebody claims they have them in China, but then looks embarrassed.

“We’re not sure if he existed, but obviously he didn’t really fight a dragon” I said.

“This is all nine thousand years ago” shouted Ryan. “This is boring”.

“It’s not nine thousand years ago” yelled Jade, “That would be before Christ”

“What I don’t understand” said Julie, “is how there can be people before Christ”.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well if God made the world, how come there were people and dinosaurs before Christ?”

“There’s a difference between the birth of Christ and the creation of the world.”

“Yeah” interrupted Jade, “But how come there were dinosaurs before Christ?”

“Like I said, the birth of Christ isn’t when the word began. The world had already been around for a while.”

“But how come there were dinosaurs millions of years before?”

“Sorry, what are you asking? I don’t see why there can’t be dinosaurs before Jesus. Christians believe Jesus was born a long time after people first appeared”

“No, you’re not listening” said Jade rudely, “how come there were dinosaurs before there were people?”

“I’m not sure what you are asking. Why shouldn’t there be dinosaurs before there were people?”

“I mean if God created the world, how come the world and dinosaurs existed before there were people?” asked Jade.

“I’m still not sure what you mean. Are you asking about the story of Adam and Eve and asking how, if God created people at the start of the universe then how could dinosaurs have existed for thousands of years beforehand?”

“Who’s Adam and Eve?” said Ryan.

“You know, from the book of Genesis”, I said.

“What’s the Book Of Genesis”, said Ryan.

“The first book of the Bible” I said.

“The Bible’s boring” said Ryan.

“Sir, sir” interrupted Jade. “I’m not talking about that. I just don’t see how God can have created the Earth if there weren’t people until millions of years after the Earth was created.

“Hang on”, I said as the penny dropped. “Do you think God is a person?”

“God’s boring” said Ryan. “I hate God”.

“Yes.” Said Jade,

“I think you’ll find people don’t think God is a person like that.”

Ibrahim and Mohsin are now rolling their eyes.

“Then why do you see pictures of him” said Julie.

“What pictures?” I said.

“You know. He has a big white beard.”

“Oh” I said. “I don’t think that’s how Christians, or other people who believe in God, actually think of God”.

“This is boring” said Ryan.

Then I paused.

“You are in year eight. You have been doing RE for a year and a half, just at this school. Why are you are asking me this? Why not your RE teacher?”

“We don’t learn anything in RE” complained Julie.

“The teacher’s boring” said Ryan “I hate him”.

“We just did one religion for ages.” This was Connor’s first contribution to the discussion.

“What religion?” I asked.

“The Muslim one” said Julie.

“No we didn’t” said Ibrahim. “We only did it for a week”.

“Wait.” instructed Jade. “What about Adam and Eve then? How come there were dinosaurs?”

“Well I said, not every Christian thinks the story of Adam and Eve is literally true. For instance the biggest Christian denomination is Roman Catholicism, and the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope…”

“The Pope’s boring” interrupted Ryan

“…has said that evolution is more than a theory”

“I think Buddhism is the true religion” said Julie.

“Do you know anything about Buddhism?” I asked.

“No” said Julie.

I wrote before about how I support the strike because, although pay isn’t that bad (well not unless you are in a shortage subject) teachers are discontented and should start kicking up a fuss.

However, my school will be remaining open with only a minimal number of us on strike. Overwhelmingly, my fellow NUT members would rather be scabs than rock the boat, even though some of are a lot unhappier at work than I am. It was not an option I considered, even as I began to feel more and more exposed on the issue. I suppose I have personal reasons for this. My grandfather worked on the railways before the war and used to tell me stories about how workers would be maimed at work, then sacked for being disabled (even though they could still work), and the only way to stop that was for the rest of the workers to down tools. Apart from the belief that effective trade unions are a fundamental part of workers’ right, a fundamental part of decent working conditions and absolutely indispensably for anybody engaged in a difficult or stressful job, this has also left me with the unavoidable feeling my grandfather would be spinning in his grave if I ever turned scab, and so I doubt I ever will. Discovering that many teachers don’t realise why they should support their union, or, more seriously, that many teachers don’t have the vaguest clue what a trade union is for has been a surprise, so I thought I’d better write a quick reply to what I’ve been hearing from the scabs:

I’m not bothered about striking. Unions negotiate for their members. If they are perceived as weak then they have a weaker negotiating position. Union members who ignore their own unions are undermining their own unions. They certainly have forfeited the right to complain about their own working conditions. If you tell the bosses you won’t fight you deserve what you get.

I only joined for legal cover. Unions are not the AA of the work place. You could buy legal insurance without joining a union. It is no excuse to say “I joined a union but not in order to be part of a union”. That means that you are stupid with your money as well as disloyal to the interests of your profession. It’s particularly daft for teachers who (to my regret) have a large choice of unions including those that never strike.

I’d strike over behaviour or working conditions but not pay. Unions cannot be effective if members pick and choose what issues they will support industrial action over. I’m the first to admit there are more pressing issues than pay, but pay is what the union has voted to strike on, failure to support that strike will undermine teachers on all issues. You either believe in collective action or you don’t, there’s no point believing in it for conditions but not for pay.

The strike will make us unpopular. What good has the popularity of teachers done us? It might not feel like it but teachers have had overwhelming support from the vast majority of the public and the vast majority of parents for a very long time. But this has been based on the sympathy people feel for victims and has done us no good at all. The idea that we should continue to be victims in order to continue to keep the public pitying us is ludicrous. I’d rather not be a doormat, even if it’s a doormat with a good reputation with the public.

A day’s strike might be ineffective. You can never be sure what it will achieve. But scabs are only making it more ineffective.

I can’t afford to strike. This would be merely pitiful if the strike wasn’t over pay. If you are short of money then you need to fight for more, more desperately than those of us who won’t miss a day’s pay. Yes, it might require sacrifice, but you hardly have a right to complain about your pay when you were unwilling to fight for more.

The kids can’t pass their exams without me being in today. Get over yourself.

I’ve been getting more money anyway due to promotion. There’s a parody of the red flag includes the lyrics: “The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last”. Declaring “I’m alright, Jack” is just selfishness. You don’t just strike for yourself, you strike for everyone particularly your less fortunate colleagues. Of course, the thought springs to mind that if you really don’t care about your colleagues then no wonder you got promoted.

I said earlier about having been raised to believe in trade unionism as a prerequisite for decent working conditions. There is another side to that. Being a scab is just plain wrong in that culture. I have to assume that many teachers must have had more generations of the middle class in their families and don’t recognise this attitude, and that this is combined with ignorance of why loyalty is required from trade union members. But there is one comment that I am hearing from scabs that winds me up. It can go in front of any of the reasons above. It is: “I am not a scab but…” Let me make it clear: If you are not turning out when your union requires you to go on strike then you are a scab and that is the end of it. Your self-pitying, selfish excuses for your disloyalty do not make it go away.

Feel free to remind me to write a blog about all the things I hate about the teaching unions. I almost wrote one already during the Easter conferences. But, even when the unions are at their worst, there is no excuse for being a scab and striking over pay at a time when many of our schools are short of qualified teachers, and many children are learning important subjects from people who have no qualification in them, is hardly the worst.

You know how much I hate to be negative. So I thought I’d mention just a few of the things I like about my job:

1. Kids are funny. Well sometimes. But they at least know absurdity when they see it. They are far more likely than adults to try and find out what the crazy fat boy in year 9 looks like when wearing mascara and lipstick, or to walk up to the head and ask “Who the hell are you?”

2. I enjoy my subject. Bizarrely, I enjoy teaching it more than I ever enjoyed learning it. There’s nothing like having to explain something to get you thinking about it in a very fundamental way.

3. I do get to make a difference. In two of the tough schools mentioned in this blog then, in between all the chaos, I got to teach sixth form classes and roughly once every two years I helped prepare a child for getting into Oxbridge, from schools where most students don’t even consider university. Less dramatically, I can usually see progress being made in my lessons.

4. I get to think about philosophy, psychology, history, politics and ethics on a daily basis. I enjoy that sort of thing. A teacher who understands nothing of justice, virtue, the mind, social class, social change and human nature will get very little out of the profession. Except promotion to SMT, of course.

5. I’ve made lots of friends in teaching. Well at least three.

6. Most of the time I’m in charge. It’s great bossing people around. Anybody who says it isn’t is a liar.

7. I never have any shortage of people to tell me if my shirt’s untucked; if my flies are undone; if my hair’s a mess, or if I smell.

8. Whenever anybody claims that children (and by extension all people) are basically good, I get to look at them with a sense of pity and the warm smug satisfaction of knowing that, whatever illusions I hold about the world, at least I will never say anything as stupid as that.

9. It is a genuinely satisfying experience to see somebody learn something particularly if they thought they couldn’t.

10. The holidays.

I wrote before about the excuses the kids always use. I think, for the sake of balance, I should suggest the excuses used by teachers and SMT to explain poor achievement ad behaviour.

Excuse: “This is a deprived area.”
Used: To explain to OFSTED inspectors, interview candidates, parents and anybody else who will listen why the school results are terrible and the kids are organised into feral gangs who engage in drawing graffiti, shoplifting and heavy drug use.
Notes: You don’t actually have to recruit students who live in the area or even be in a deprived area to use this excuse. It is just something teachers and headteachers say. I’m sure even the headteacher of Eton has spent lots of time explaining that a lot of the children there come from broken homes (and that’s just the members of the royal family) and that past students have included many who ceased to be respectable through taking drugs or becoming leader of the Conservative Party (or, in some cases, both).

Excuse: “Families here have no educational aspirations.”
Used: When the Careers Service notices that the two occupations they get most questions about are “single parent” and “gangsta”.
Notes: Schools despair that their students have no academic role models. If only they could find people who were highly educated, widely respected and happy in their jobs, who would then be introduced to the kids and thereby encourage them to have similar aspirations for themselves. But where would you find anybody like that in a school?

Excuse: “We don’t have the support of parents.”
Used: As a standard formula for explaining poor behaviour.
Notes: It is the ironic that as schools are required to perform basic parenting tasks, like telling children about sex and drugs, teaching them good manners, or monitoring their happiness they seem to become more convinced that parents are the key to discipline. While, of course, parents can help, it seems somewhat strange that schools are convinced what happens at home is more important than what happens at school. Parents are actually likely to be at a disadvantage when disciplining children as they have an in-built bias towards believing the best of their off-spring, they are likely to have to live with them afterwards and they usually hope to remain in contact with their children even after they reach school leaving age.

Excuse: “The children here aren’t academic.”
Used: To lower expectations.
Notes: There are two things to notice about non-academic kids. Firstly, they are never your own children. Not all parents value education, but if they value it for themselves then they value it for their children, no matter how unpromising the child’s prospects actually are. Teachers who proudly deny that the kids they teach have academic potential will talk incessantly about the prospects of their own treasured off-spring and their efforts to get them into the best schools. Secondly, non-academic kids are always reputed to have a host of non-academic skills to fall back on. Every illiterate is a potential plumber, soldier, beautician, carpenter or architect. The possibility that their low level of education will limit their potential even in the non-academic career planned for them is not even to be considered. After all there’s no point casting pearls before swine (unless they come from your own litter).

Excuse: “They are turned off by all the preparation for tests.”
Used: To explain why students aren’t enthralled with their lessons and to suggest that it is somehow the fault of the Government
Notes: This is a variation on the suggestion that learning should be interesting, which has always been an unlikely claim when you consider that knowing things is not always interesting. However, unlike the conventional version which claims teachers should be more entertaining this version suggests that if students didn’t get tested on what they had learnt then suddenly their lessons would be a cross between Think of a Number and Dead Poets’ Society. While revision lessons are often boring, nobody seems keen to point out the obvious fact that it might actually be necessary to go over what you’ve learnt even if there weren’t tests. In fact the possibility that in the absence of tests pupils will be left to forget everything they’ve learnt previously is probably a good argument in favour of frequent testing.

My time as a pillar of the community paid off this week. Well sort of. A friend of mine invited me to a meeting where a number of “community leaders” and assorted leading lights from voluntary organisations and local agencies were to meet a visiting minister.

I may have mentioned before that I used to be quite political, but since becoming a teacher I have it too depressing for words to hear politically motivated people talk about education from a position of ignorance. I managed to start the day in exactly that fashion. A student activist told me how in many other countries children didn’t learn to read and write at school until they were seven (true) and there were schools like that in this country (not really true, or at least not true by intention). I suggested that a lot of this was explained by complexity of the writing system (you will need to start learning Chinese a lot earlier than German) rather than there being a natural age for writing. Another young activist (this time sixth form age) told me how his school was “seventy five per cent working class” apparently unaware that it was by far and away the poshest state school in the city.

For the main ministerial visit I was seated with a police inspector, some representatives of residents’ associations and somebody from a housing association. We were encouraged to discuss, around our tables, a number of questions about local issues and it soon became clear that there was a lot of sense being talked around the table (which in my experience is not common for these sorts of events). Lenient sentences for repeat offenders and juveniles who break their ASBOs were roundly condemned and the police inspector spent plenty of time answering criticism of the local police and apparently showing a general interest in improving things. I had quite a long talk with a local politician, who also works for an MP, about how the schools locally work and was pleased to find that he was generally interested. He was particularly curious as to why students now seem to do half as many subjects as they did when he was sixteen.

It soon emerged that our special ministerial guests included the Prime Minister. He came round and asked what we’d discussed in our groups. Naturally, people were keen to talk about the problems with anti-social behaviour and repeat offenders in their area, as ever this focused on the young.

 “So do you think there needs to be earlier intervention?” he asked. People half-murmured their agreement but stuck to pointing out the importance of what needed to be done now. One of the representatives of local residents, Ray, finally raised the obvious issue when discussing young criminals: “What I don’t understand is what schools are doing about this?” He recounted how children in his family had been bullied at local secondary schools only for the schools to do nothing and claim “we don’t have bullying here.” As the least important person at the table, probably least important person in the room, I hadn’t been talking at all previously. Now was my chance:

 “What you describe is quite normal” I said. “I’m a teacher. It is normal for schools to fail to deal with bullying or behaviour problems. They make a real effort to cover them up.”

 “Who do?” asked the Prime Minister.

 “Senior management in schools. It’s very common for schools to ignore the fact that kids don’t feel safe there, or even staff.”

 “Yes,” interjected Ray, “and this sort of thing can scar a child for life”.

 At this moment one of the Prime Ministers’ aides came over and said it was time to finish off. (I assume this was true and she hadn’t just decided that the Prime Minister was being bothered by an insane teacher.) She asked if anything interesting had come up.

 “We were talking about the importance of early intervention,” said the Prime Minister.

The politicians then said their goodbyes to the room, summing up what they had heard. Apparently what the Prime Minister had heard from our table was about the importance of early intervention. I knew it had been raised in the discussion, but I could have sworn the person who raised it was named “Gordon Brown” and hadn’t been at the table when we sat down.

Anyway, I thought I’d better share that with you. Blogging is a very good way of putting across a message that can be ignored by everyone who needs to hear it. I decided I’d let you know that I’ve at least made the effort to be ignored in real life too.

Well I’ll be on strike on April 24th.

There’s nothing much to say about why I’ll be on strike. If you are in a union and it takes industrial action then you really have to support it or there isn’t any point being in a union in the first place. In a situation like this where there are a lot of alternative unions to join it seems pointless being part of a union if you are not willing to cooperate when it take action on your behalf and a poor turn-out for the strike will simply weaken the NUT’s negotiating position in the future.

I will, however, say why I voted “yes” to the strike option. I wasn’t convinced that our pay rise was unreasonably low. I’m not convinced that teachers are badly paid. I would much rather have had the opportunity to take action on a whole host of other issues. However, the teaching unions in this country are fragmented and incoherent. They all seek to represent bosses as well as teachers, primary as well as secondary, private as well as public sector. They will never be able to represent all these groups’ interests in a coherent way. The most any union can do is raise issues such as pay that cut across the boundaries and if the issue is close enough to what concerns you in your sector and your type of school then you should support your union raising that that issue.

I do have a problem with teachers’ pay. As I said it’s not the percentage raise nor is it the general level of teachers’ wages. I object to the way it is allocated. There are no across the board, long term financial rewards for:

• Having extensive academic knowledge (even if you are the only person in a school able to teach a subject)
• Having good qualifications (even ones that would make it easy to work elsewhere or ones that are directly related to teaching)
• Working in challenging schools or with children who need the most help
• Teaching a shortage subject

After the first few years of teaching the only ways to increase your pay are:

1.  Promotion (which can mean spending less time teaching)
2. Various forms of performance related pay such as passing threshold or acquiring Advanced Skills Teacher status

Unfortunately, the downside to these is that they ultimately require either support or approval from Senior Management. This means that in teaching the money is handed over not for what you know but because of who you know. This situation makes it difficult for teachers to be either academic role models or autonomous professionals. Or to put it another way, the things I do to make myself a better teacher or to contribute more to society are far less financially rewarding than the things I do to please SMT.

I do realise that it is optimistic to hope that a strike over the pay deal will make government look at teachers’ pay in a constructive way, but the unfairness of the system couldn’t be any worse. I also realise that I am calling out for someone to respond with a cry of “Won’t somebody think of the children?” However, more than anyone teachers do think of the children. Who do you think loses out most when schools in poor areas can’t, on current levels of pay, find enough qualified maths or science specialists? Who do you think loses out most when teachers are recruited extensively from among low achieving graduates? A change to the rewards of teachers could far more to benefit students than lofty disdain for strike action on the part of the teaching unions.

One more thing: although the turn-out was not much to boast about the vote was 75% in favour of striking. I don’t think I’m the only teacher feeling gravely discontented at the moment.

This blog is about the state of secondary education. There is an introduction to it here:

• Welcome (or welcome back) to the Battleground

There is a discipline crisis and a lowering of standards both academic and professional. The following posts sum up what is typical in schools these days:

• The Top Five Lies About Behaviour
• They Call It PSHE, I Call It Hell
• The Naughty Boy
• The Disruptive Girl
• How To Find Out If Your Teacher Is Gay
• Unsolved Mysteries of Teaching
• Getting “Terrored”
• Mixed Ability Teaching Doesn’t Exist
• The Appeasers
• The Joy of Sets
• Not-So Special Needs
• The F***-Off Factor
• Ten Things to Know About the Kids
• Political Education Goes Down the Toilet
• Values
• Excuses, Excuses: Part 1
• Excuses, Excuses: Part 2
• Excuses, Excuses: Part 3
• Excuses, Excuses: Part 4
• The Two Discipline Systems
• “I Don’t Get It”
• Zen and the Art of Going to the Lavatory
• Ammunition
• The Year 11 Tipping Point
• 10 Things You Never Hear In Teaching
• A Few More Words About Appeasement

As well as the advice for teachers included in many of the other posts, I have written advice specifically for new teachers:

• FAQs for NQTs
• Is This Normal?

These deal more directly with my own personal experiences:

• The Corridor of Death
• The SIG Group
• The Anonymous Questionnaire. Part 1
• The Anonymous Questionnaire. Part 2
• The Behaviour Management Database
• More from the Behaviour Management Database
• A Good Class
• Non-Discipline Day
• Five Incidents That Didn’t Result In A Permanent Exclusion
• The Culture of Blame
• The Most Ridiculous Complaints Against Me Ever Made
• Being Supported by a Year Head
• Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the Education System
• The Core Business of Schools
• I Have A Dream
• Doctor What?
• I Have a Bad Relationship with the Kids

I have also written a number of posts exploring and explaining how this situation came to be, discussing the arguments in education and suggesting what can be done.

• Modern Education is Rubbish Part 1. Where Are We Now?
• Modern Education is Rubbish Part 2. What Should We Be Trying To Do?
• Modern Education is Rubbish Part 3. Why Are Our Schools Failing?
• A Brief History of Education. Part 1. Educational Thought
• A Brief History of Education Part 2. The 1944 Education Act
• A Brief History of Education Part 3. The Rise of the Comprehensive
• A Brief History of Education Part 4. The Assault on Professionalism
• The Cast of Culprits Part 1. The Students
• The Cast of Culprits Part 2. The Teachers
• The Cast of Culprits Part 3. The School Leaders
• The Cast Of Culprits: Part 4. The Bureaucrats
• Why I Like Being a Teacher
• If Only They Didn’t Have to Learn
• Gag the Student Voice
• Bad Ideas for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis
• Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #1: Make Lessons More Fun
• Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #2: Bring Back Selection
• Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #3: End Compulsory Education
• Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #4: Have More Vocational Subjects
• Bad Idea for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis #5: End Parental Choice
• The First Law of Behaviour Management
• The Second Law of Behaviour Management
• The Third Law of Behaviour Management
• The Fourth Law of Behaviour Management
• Teach First, Repent at Leisure
• Just For The Record, I Don’t Hate The Kids
• Why Education Shouldn’t be Run by Bankers
• “But They Have To Go Somewhere”
• Professionalism
• The Devil’s Own Education System
• In Praise of Harshness
• Detentions: Part 1
• Detentions: Part 2

I have also outlined what I would expect from schools willing to do put things right:

• My Dream School: Part 1
• My Dream School: Part 2

Finally, there are a few posts I wrote purely for a laugh (although some of them perhaps make a point at the same time):

• The Driving Lesson
• The Cult of INSET
• The Theory of Multiple Fitnesses
• The Kennedy Assassination: A Headteacher’s Perspective
• Blood and Guts
• Blame The Teacher - 1947 Style

Despite my criticisms of teachers and students I’m still confident that the majority of teachers remain hardworking, dedicated and capable and the majority of students still wish to achieve academically. Although there are excellent secondary headteachers out there – looking for schools where results have improved from nothing to the top of the league table might help you find some of them – there is a widespread problem of heads that cannot make a difference to the problems of their schools and more importantly heads that do not believe they should be solving the problems of their schools.
The reasons for this are probably down to the following:

• A funding system, inspection system and management systems that are based on paperwork and navigating bureaucracy that conspire to keep heads busy but disconnected from the day to day running of the school.
• A conservatism that convinces heads that all problems their schools face can be dealt with by traditional methods: good teaching; reminding staff of expectations; letters to parents; telling middle managers what to do, rather than new methods and new distributions of responsibility.
• Promotion of the weak, ineffectual and visionless. Managers who are committed to the education system as it is rather than towards rescuing schools from the system who would never dream of standing up to pushy parents or incompetent LEAs seem to have a career advantage.
• The continuing persistence of discredited ideologies. In particular, a belief in mixed ability teaching in as many subjects as possible, and a belief that children from deprived backgrounds cannot be expected to learn or behave.

In practice this means that teachers often encounter the following behaviour from senior managers that undermine them and their ability to teach:

• Blaming teachers for all discipline problems. This includes disorder in the corridors, and around the site, problems faced by all new teachers, and worst of all verbal and physical abuse of staff. (The key phrase used is “Discipline is all about relationships”). This is made worse when those head teachers do not teach and have had the power and status of being senior management to protect them for years.
• Delegating discipline to middle managers, and worst of all to departments. If large groups of students work together to disrupt lessons, or if detentions are not attended there is little or nothing that departmental managers can do. Even heads of years have only limited time to deal with discipline problems and do not have the power to exclude, which is often what is required.
• Appeasing students, parents and LEAs. It’s hard to believe how many headteachers seem to believe that they are representatives of interest groups rather than leaders in their own right, attempting to achieve their own clearly stated goals. Nothing is more damaging to staff morale than having no idea what SMT want, but knowing that they are subject to random complaints and unreasonable demands from management.
• Bullying management techniques. Some heads ignore statutory conditions, intimidate trade union reps, routinely lie in references, and never keep their promises.

There are a few changes that could be made to improve the situation.

• A change in school funding so that heads no longer have to become full-time form-fillers in order to ensure a good deal for their students. A general reduction in bureaucracy will make management positions more appealing to teachers.
• A change in discipline so that the responsibility for discipline (and, in particular, sanctions) falls squarely on Senior Management Teams and cannot be delegated. Discipline systems must state consequences and responsibilities exactly. Any responsibilities that fall on classroom teachers cannot involve unpaid overtime, or be unspecified by their contracts. Failure for managers to comply with their own systems should be considered a breach of contract.
• INSET for senior management to consist of doing a day’s supply teaching in a neighbouring school. Managers who are disconnected from the realities of teaching life are a huge problem in schools.
• A statutory duty for heads to permanently exclude pupils who assault or verbally abuse staff, deal drugs or bring in weapons and a corresponding end to all targets and financial incentives to reduce exclusions. No head should be able to say their hands are tied on exclusions.
• An end to:
  1.  mixed ability teaching (which still persists in the vast majority of subjects)
  2.  inclusion
  3.  the tolerance of poor schools in deprived areas.

Perhaps the worst part of poor management in schools is that a long history of failure is no obstacle to a further career in school management. As I said before there are heads that turn round schools and make a name for themselves as “superheads” and experts in “school improvement”. What there is less publicity for is the army of “not-so-superheads” and “school destroyers” who after turning a good school bad go on to serve for many years as LEA advisors and quangocrats, helping other headteachers to follow their bad example.

This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before and also for the fact that some of it covers the same ground as one of my more recent posts.

Until the mid 1970s, the acceptable degrees for secondary mathematics teachers were “mathematics” or “mathematics with physics”. Combined degrees in two or three subjects, including mathematics, then became acceptable. Today the range of acceptable degrees has broadened further still. In our own institution we look …. in cases where degree content is borderline, for good mathematics A-level results or a higher degree in a numerate discipline.

Tikly et al (2000)

However, even if it is unclear whether teachers with better personal academic records or qualifications are necessarily better teachers, there is concern about the difficulties experienced in recruiting teachers from the top end of the ability distribution. There is some evidence in the UK (Chevalier et al 2001; Nickell and Quintini 2002)….that current teachers are being drawn from further down the educational achievement or ability distribution than they were in the past.

Chevalier et al (2005)

In some ways teachers are probably better than ever. I am not accepting the often heard claims that using an interactive whiteboard and knowing how to plan a three part lesson represent major improvements, but I do believe that the climate of secondary education at the moment is such that teachers have to be exceptionally committed not to move to a profession where they will not be treated with contempt and anger for the entire working day just for doing their job. (For instance they could become traffic wardens.)

However, there are a few ways that teachers are part of the problems we are facing:

The trend over a number the decades has been for teachers to have ever lower qualifications each year. Accordingly many teachers can’t spell, have poor subject knowledge and aren’t familiar with developments in education. More critically we are no longer trained in anything much beyond the day to day business of teaching. This change was a reaction to an excess of theory with teachers being taught the sociology of education rather than how to control a class. This has now reached the extreme point where those training to teach no longer have any opportunity to reflect on what it means to be a teacher. Academic, ethical and theoretical knowledge are no longer the norm. A quick way to demonstrate this is to look on any teacher’s forum on the internet for discussions of what “professionalism” means. You will find that most correspondents have no idea of what is pretty much a fundamental of the philosophy of education. You will also find that roughly half of those discussing it can’t spell it either.

Secondly, more and more teachers now see the current state of education as normal. Poor behaviour, mixed ability classes including students who won’t access any work, and classes that cannot be directly taught are part of their experience of every year of their teaching career, their training course, and increasingly their own education as well. Every year more and more teachers enter the profession believing that their job is to entertain children in an educational way in a chaotic environment, rather than to actually teach. In fact it’s debatable how many of us even know the dictionary definition of the word “teach”. It means “to give systematic information about (a subject or skill)” – nothing there about colouring in. I don’t think the “culture war” within teaching is lost yet, but there is a strong need for teachers to stand up for the belief that students should be expected to behave and teachers should be expected to teach in the literal sense of the word.

Finally, there is the behaviour of some the survivors of the current system. Many teachers have managed to carve out their own enclaves of civilisation in their classroom where the traditional assumptions still hold. However, many of the most ambitious teachers, including many school managers, have adopted other survival strategies. The key strategy is appeasement. The key aspects of this strategy are:

• Lavish attention on the worst behaved students. Give them attention and praise, not just for their work but for anything that might win them over to you.
• Make friends with the students. If they like you, then it won’t matter that they aren’t learning. This is easier to do in subjects where there is no formal assessment.
• Don’t push the students too far with difficult work. In subjects which aren’t often assessed the students can believe they are doing well continually if thy never have to do difficult work.
• Don’t follow the school procedures for discipline, particularly those that will involve other members of staff. It will antagonise the students and lead to management thinking you can’t handle your classes. Instead “swallow your smoke”.

Now imagine the effects this strategy has when employed across the school. Badly behaved pupils will always want attention, there will be low expectations of work, and teachers who set difficult work or maintain professional distance will be drawn into conflict with pupils. Moreover any teacher expecting outside support with behaviour will be seen as part of the problem.

These trends have created a significant “enemy within” for the teaching profession. There are strong signs, however, that within the normal teaching ranks they remain a minority. The dangers are that this is not the case within school management, and that the situation will get worse as more and more teachers with a solid professional ethos either leave the profession or eschew seeking promotion.

References:

Chevalier, Arnold; Dolton, Peter and McIntosh, S., Recruiting and Retaining Teachers in the UK: An analysis of graduate occupation choice from the 1960s to the 1990s, London School Of Economics, 2001
Chevalier, Arnold and Dolton, Peter, The Labour Market for Teachers, in Machin et all (2005)
Machin, Stephen and Vignoles, Anna, What’s the Good of Education, Princeton University Press 2005
Nickell, S. and Quintini, G., The consequences of the decline in public sector pay in Britain: A little bit of evidence, The Economic Journal 112, 2002
Tikly, Clare and Wolf, Alison, The Maths We Need Now: Demands, Deficits and Remedies. Institute of Education, 2000

Details of teacher qualifications can be found here  Discussion of this entry and/or teacher qualifications can be found on TES

This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before.

And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

2 Kings 2:23

I now intend to explore the individuals that make up our education world. First on the list are the people it’s all about: the students. To listen to some teachers you’d think today’s children were without historical precedent. However a quick look at the quote at the start of this entry reveals that delinquent youths have been around for as long as written records survive. Even distinctly modern problems, like rising divorce and illegitimacy, are unlikely to result in stresses on family life greater than some other eras (such as those during the world wars) have dealt with.

There are however factors that make recent generations of students stand out:

Age. There is a historical process by which the maximum age of the school population seems to be rising. It is only since 1973 that the school leaving age has been 16, and since then the law and regulations have changed further pushing the point at which students leave later and later in the year. There is now talk of raising the leaving age further. This process means that students are trapped in school to a later and later age. This has massive consequences for discipline – effective punishment is more difficult with 16 year olds than with 11 year olds. I am sure that I am not the only teacher that shudders when the media report suggestions that the school leaving age be raised to 18.

Attitudes Towards Knowledge. We now have developed a generation with very little respect for expertise. It is quite normal for adults, let alone students, to give no regard to expert knowledge. Look around you in the media for examples of

• Painstakingly compiled statistics being dismissed as lies (almost any Government statistic is dismissed as fraudulent despite the mass of expert statisticians employed by the civil service). The fact that the methodology is publically known, the shortcomings openly stated and the research extensive does not stop people dismissing crime or unemployment figures as complete invention.
• Journalists interviewing other journalists, rather than experts, about highly complex topics.
• The blurring of the boundaries of expertise (eg. biologists commenting on religion, linguists commenting on politics, scientists commenting on ethics).
• Opinions voiced by those with no expertise of a subject appearing alongside the opinions of experts. (“Next we’ll be discussing the role of religion in society with the Archbishop of Canterbury and Shannon from Girls Aloud”)
• The use of Vox Pops, i.e. interviews with random members of the public, as journalism. I can’t be the only person to react badly when a news broadcaster says “and now to find out what you think…”. I know what I think, thank you very much, I’d like to know what somebody better informed than me thinks if it’s all the same to you.

Now secondary teachers should be subject experts (degree level with a decent classification) imparting knowledge to the young. What hope do they have of gaining respect for that knowledge if expert knowledge is considered by society to be on a par with uninformed opinion? It is perhaps an irony that teachers who are so shocked that students don’t respect their expertise are as equally likely as others in society to disrespect the expertise of others.

Personal Responsibility. Children today live in a world where the traditional consequences of selfish, inconsiderate or even harmful actions have been neutered. The political right don’t hesitate to draw our attention towards the idea that the welfare state has helped save the poor from their own fecklessness. However even for those not on the brink of poverty there are obvious signs that misdeeds and the price of misdeeds and misdemeanours no longer need be paid:

• Shame. Behaviour that would once have scandalised communities is now beamed directly to our houses in soap operas and reality game shows.
• Blame. A wide array of newly discovered syndromes (like Oppositional Defiance Disorder) has, along with the pervasiveness of pop psychology explanations of human behaviour, let it be known that people in general, and children in particular, are not to be considered to be in control of their own actions.
• Conscience. An emphasis on feelings, have informed us all that feeling bad about doing bad things, is a psychological problem rather than a moral one.
• Moral authority. Those institutions that might once have been seen as embodying morality such as churches, teachers, or the police have been either sidelined for being no longer relevant, or reformed so as to be less judgemental.
• Commitment. Personal integrity is no longer held to be important. The most obvious example of this is “no fault divorce” whereby individuals can arrange to stop keeping their promises without any suggestion that this suggests bad faith on anybody’s part.
• Punishment by parents. A no doubt well intentioned effort to stop abuse has left parents absolutely baffled as to how to chastise their children. Parents feel that a smack is anssault, that disapproval is blackmail and that withdrawing treats is neglect.
• Punishment by the police. I hate to think what would happen to a police officer that gave a naughty child a clip round the ear in public. For details of the morally neutral, non-judgemental character of modern policing methods see Copperfield (2006)

Without these forces then the pressure on individuals to take responsibility for their actions is far less. This is not just a moral problem, the ability to take responsibility for what is happening around you has also been identified as a key attribute for being effective in achieving personal and professional goals (Covey (1989)).

Now combine these three factors together and before we even start looking at the other players in education, there are reasons to suggest that the culture that influences students outside of school is often not one that equips the young with the values that will enable them to acquire the full benefits of full time education.

References:

Beck, John and Earl, Mary, Key Issues In Secondary Education, Continuum 2003
Copperfield, David, Wasting Police Time, Monday Books, 2006
Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press, 1989
Lowe, Chris, Pupils, Their Education and the Law, The Questions Publishing Company, 1999