Scenes From The Battleground

A recurring topic here is that of The Appeasers, those who believe that the best way to get bad kids to behave is to treat them better than other kids.

Here I intend to discuss the beliefs that underlie this course of action. These beliefs are theological in nature, dedicated as they are to describing their God: an object of worship and obedience known as The Child. These are the key doctrines of Child-Worshippers:

Dogma 1: The Child is born without sin. Unlike teachers, who are clearly tainted by Original Sin, all children are basically good. To suggest otherwise, particularly to suggest that there are bad kids out there, is to commit a form of blasphemy known as “labelling”. Because all children are good then all rewards provided for children are inherently deserved no matter what conventional morality might say.

Dogma 2: Anything The Child does that appears to be wrong is not His fault. This is a corollary of Dogma 1. Because children are inherently good, they cannot be responsible for anything bad that happens. Because of this it makes no sense to punish a child and anyone attempting to do so is guilty of sacrilege. Deities do not have to follow the normal laws of cause and effect. Therefore, bad behaviour can be caused by how adults react to it. For instance children might be badly behaved because a teacher shouted at them, even if it might appear to infidels that the children were shouted at because they were badly behaved.

Dogma 3: The Child is always the victim. Whatever happens, the fundamental truth is that any child is actually in the right and suffering for our sins. They may be suffering from poverty, discrimination or bad teaching. They are suffering at all times. They cannot have brought any problem on themselves and anyone who they don’t like must have been unfair to them.

Dogma 4: The Child has needs that must be met. If an apostate falls away from this faith and suggests that actually some children are perfectly fine, thank you very much, and should perhaps stop behaving like animals, then this indicates that their lack of faith has caused them to fail to diagnose the children’s needs. These are not like the needs of mortals. Normally people only need things for a particular purpose. These needs on the other hand are actually divine rights to attention and sympathy. The more unreasonable and unpleasant children are then the greater their needs.

Dogma 5: The wrath of The Child is always righteous. If a child verbally abuses you, hits you, or disrupts your lesson, it is what you deserved for your sins. You have failed to worship them sufficiently or appreciate their divine authority (probably because you failed to appreciate their victim status). All such wrath is a divine judgement on your impiety. If you were just nicer to children then you would be among the saved.

Dogma 6: The Child is not subject to normal moral reasoning. You might be aware that you personally can be tempted by evil. Children never are, and you can never assume that anything a child does has a questionable motive. It is your duty to excuse children’s behaviour for reasons, like poverty, being in a bad mood, or a lack of self-esteem that would never be an excuse in normal moral life.

Dogma 7: These Dogmas are psychological facts. Like other modern religions the beliefs of the Child-Worshippers are not just compatible with science, they are proved by them. All these beliefs correspond to psychological theories. These theories must be held to be true even if they have since been discredited or have no empirical basis. Insight into the true nature of children cannot be gained through any other domain of human experience, such as philosophy, history, literature, common sense, religion or even other types of psychology that have reached different conclusions.

Dogma 8: The infidels must be punished. Anybody who doubts these dogmas is a bad teacher. It is “scary“ that they might be let near children. They must be motivated only by hatred. Their inability to realise that all badly behaved children are disabled and poor suggests that they hate the disabled and poor, and probably black people too. All the things that you must never do to children, like judge them, label them, or punish them, can be done to these infidels. Indeed a belief that there are no bad children requires a belief that there are plenty of bad teachers.

Dogma 9: Any failure to find the promised land is due to apostasy. If after accepting all the dogmas, following the every whim of children and diagnosing their needs hasn’t led us out of the wilderness, then this can only be due to a lack of faith. Two signs of the apostasy of the people are most common and to be most roundly condemned. The first is “traditional teaching” which covers any practice that suggests a belief in discipline or academic rigour. The second is “a lack of resources” and is a failure to spend enough money on children, even though the money that had already been spent did no good at all.

Dogma 10: These dogmas do not apply to the priesthood. The high priests of appeasement reserve the right to withdraw all their own dogmas if it might affect themselves or their own children. A belief in the inclusion of badly behaved children does not mean you can’t send your children to a private school or demand severe punishments for any child who bullies one of your own offspring. Similarly any child who is a threat to an appeaser’s reputation for having “good relationships” with difficult kids must be punished.

In this entry I expressed my disagreement with Steer’s (2006) claim that behaviour was effectively managed and that it was rarely extreme in nature. This is the usual view of the educational establishment.

However, whenever teachers themselves are asked then the news on behaviour becomes very different:

A survey of 813 ATL members in primary and secondary state schools published in March 2008 found that:

• 51% of teachers were dissatisfied with the behaviour policy of their school or college.
• 64% had considered changing profession because of behaviour, and a similar proportion had seen colleagues leave because of behaviour.
• 100% had dealt with disruptive pupils.
• 29% had dealt with physical aggression.
• 35.3% with physical intimidation.
• 75.3% with verbal abuse or threats
• 94.5% had dealt with disrespect such as “use of mobile phone in class, ignoring teacher’s requests”

A Teacher Support Network survey in March 2007 found that of 433 teachers who responded:

“92 per cent had been verbally abused by pupils and 49 per cent had been physically abused. Of those who had been physically abused, 53 per cent had been assaulted with a thrown object, 26 per cent with a ‘weapon’ such as furniture or equipment, two per cent with a knife and one per cent with a gun. The attacks included stabbing with scissors and nails, strangulation, hands trapped in doors, and one teacher had a fire extinguisher turned on them.”

A 2003 NASUWT survey of 300 schools counted 126 physical assaults, 62 sexual insults or threats and nine cases of racist verbal abuse in a ten day period.

A 2008 NUT survey found evidence of how frequently poor behaviour was encountered. The following percentages reported the following behaviour:

This data appears far more shocking when you realise that it will not be evenly distributed. There will be schools that have far more than their fair share, and skills where this behaviour is rare. Certain types of behaviour will be far more common in secondary schools than primary school. For a large proportion of teachers in tough schools the disruption to teaching, and the stress and strain caused by poor behaviour is the core demand of being a teacher. All other priorities are secondary to protecting yourself, your students, and their learning from the consequences of their behaviour.

References:

Alan Steer (chair), Learning Behaviour: The Report of The Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, DFES

Education has long been enough of an ideological battleground for there to have been philosophies which have developed their own mythologies. A further factor in the promotion of myths for teachers is the fact that before the internet much false information was transmitted through photocopied sheets and teaching had particularly good access to copiers and printing machines. As a result there are many teaching myths repeated to students by education lecturers, transmitted around the internet, or simply quoted as fact by teachers who should know better.

Here’s three of them trawled from the internet. I’d be interested to hear if you have been told any of these myths, whether you thought they were true, and whether you can suggest any others I could add to the list.

Myth 1: The following are rules for teachers from 1872:

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, trim the wicks and clean chimneys.

2. Each morning the teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.

3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.

4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they attend church regularly.

5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or any other good books.

6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.

7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.

8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.

9. The teacher who performs his labours faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five pence per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

From http://heathhill.blogspot.com/2005/12/rules-for-teachers-1872-style.html

Actually, many variants of these rules exist, from many countries. We can safely assume that it is fake simply because there is no consistency in any version about where it is meant to be from. I was first shown them on my PGCE course by a lecturer who seemed convinced they were genuine.

Myth 2: As every SENCO knows; Einstein was dyslexic

With proper recognition and intervention, dyslexics and individuals with ADD become successful individuals using their talents and skills to enrich our society. They may take their place alongside other dyslexics/ADDs, such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Nelson Rockefeller.

From http://www.dyslexia-add.org/

Einstein suffered from dyslexia. He is a clear example of a person who would be labelled as learning disabled in today’s educational system. With the right approach to education, these labels cannot prevent great accomplishments, as proven by Einstein and others.

From http://www.einsteinmontessori.com/ems.php?category=about_albert_einstein

Albert Einstein - He could not talk until the age of four. He did not learn to read until he was nine. His teachers considered him slow, unsociable and a dreamer. He failed the entrance examinations to college but finally passed them after an additional year of preparation.

From http://bodineschoolideaexchange.blogspot.com/2007/09/great-dyslexicalbert-einstein.html

There are also variants of this about many other historical figures.

Actually, Einstein’s biographers, e.g. Pais (1982), do not confirm these stories and his academic success leaves very little grounds for thinking he had any form of learning disorder, let alone one severe enough that it could be diagnosed posthumously.

Myth 3: Ancient Writers show that kids were always this badly behaved and that adults were always just as worried about behaviour.

Have you ever heard the following quotations? They all seek to indicate that any modern concern about the young is misplaced by suggesting that similar concerns have been expressed in other eras:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

From Socrates (470BC-490BC) according to http://www.zerosharednickels.com/wordpress/?p=263 and http://onemansblog.com/2007/04/23/socrates-and-the-problem-with-children/

Or alternatively Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) according to http://beautifulbeacon.blogspot.com/2008/01/generational-divide.html

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

From Cicero (106BC-43BC) according to http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/662 and http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/11/children-no-lon.html

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.

From Hesiod (circa 700BC) according to http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_see_no_hope_for_the_future_of_our_people_if/13669.html and http://www.laughlin.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123036815

The world is passing through troubled times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behaviour and dress.

Peter the Hermit (died 1115AD) according to http://www.lifeway.com/understanding/youth/article_temp.asp?ArticleID=3 or “Peter the Monk” [sic], according to http://rivergirlie.wordpress.com/2006/11/

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC) according to http://blogs.osltraining.co.uk/classroom_management/2007/12/what-is-happeni.html

Actually, a quick search will reveal that although these quotes appear many, many times in many, many places, you will soon notice that no source includes the text in the original language or a reference to any academic text where it can be found. All of them appear to be twentieth century inventions.

References

Pais, Abraham, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, 1982

A couple of friends have drawn my attention to these discussions, and yes I couldn’t avoid getting involved:

Schools today, good kid, bad kid

How does he know?

The first link is probably best described as a site for liberal Christians. The second is a political blog by a prominent Hackney councillor.

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.

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.