My feelings have become increasingly uneasy the more I do this job. Before I started training, I thought, how hard can it be? Then I saw how hard it can be. Sure it’s a demanding job, but the increasing bureaucracy, an insistence on vast quantities of paperwork, on assessments and testing and more assessments and more testing and statistics and targets and more and more and more pressure, on the kids, on the staff, on the parents, seems antithetical to the very idea of what education is or should be...
And the fact that every time you think you’ve got a handle on what you should be doing, they throw it out and insist on new strategies, new schemes of work, new demands on the curriculum (not worked out, not thought through, unresourced, unfocused…) I spent 3 years teaching the same age group, but never got to use the same plans twice.
Who’s running this? Surely they can’t believe it’s a good idea to run things like this… your bottom line has always got to be, is it helping the kids? Is the amount of time we spend tapping data into the computer the best use of our time, or would it be better spent with the children?
But now I’m getting really really cynical. Because it’s so clearly stupid, and a waste of everyone’s time… every day, reinventing the wheel, on the behalf of people who have no clear knowledge or beliefs regarding how children learn the best; a case of ignoring basic common sense, and years of people saying til they’re blue in the face, that we need a creative,child-centred approach...
It’s not that they don’t trust to do our jobs as professionals, as I once thought - now I’m thinking, that they don’t WANT education to educate. They WANT to tie us up in paperwork, to get us so hung up on keeping on top of the mountains of changing legislation, that we’re baffled at what we’re doing.
You’re so busy trying to keep up with the shitwork that you have no time, or indeed energy, to question it. To make it creative, which encourages the kids to be creative; to encourage them to solve problems, to become bright,questioning, thinking, independent human beings.
Because really, truly, they don’t want that. They want passive little worker drones, used to jumping through hoops, passingtheir little tests, leaving school to go on to get shit, poorly paid McJobs with no future.
They’re at the bottom of society already, what hope have they got? At least in the 60s with the secondary moderns, it was more honest about the difference in children’s prospects according to their class, and you might even get taught a trade along the way... Why not squash every spark of interest and curiosity and individuality in the name of SATs? Let the private school kids (at the private schools which don’t have to answer to the LEAs) go on to further education and get the good jobs. Let’s face it, there’s not enough interesting well-paid work to go around.
I don’t want to be a part of that system any more.
About horses
4 days ago
27 comments:
Got any idea what you'd like to be doing instead?
With regards the systems and things, I sympathise.
I think there's a tendency for those at the top to see problems in the way things work and react in one of two ways: either you see something bad happen and bolt on more process and system to stop it happening in future, or worse you assume it's a fatal flaw in the system and throw everything out.
It generally ends up with constant arbitrary change rather than a steady evolution, and often with regulation and process getting bigger all the time. Too much system stifles everyone; the staff, the pupils, even the parents.
I suppose the counter-argument is that the less process you have, the more chance that sometimes something will go wrong. Perhaps it's easier for the government (or any other senior management) to wave away vague criticism about a general decline in standards, rather than risk more mistakes of a tangible and blameworthy kind.
I'm glad I'm not management. To be managed is something I can't really avoid.
Shit. We need to catch up! Brainstorm session!
It was more honest in the 70's - you're right. It was made very clear to those of us who failed the 11+, that we were failures for life. There weren't any trades on offer for girls, though I could have been truanting that day!
I always think a priority of education should be teaching people to think. Yes facts and skills too. But thinking is such a great skill. And I'm sure I wasn't encouraged to. I think philosophy is a more widespread part of (secondary) education here in continental Europe. Well, at least in the bits of it I know. Which is not to say that Russia(for example)'s education isn't also about cramming people full of facts, but there seems to be a respect for education and knowledge and learning in their system that there isn't in the UK.
Mind you, I might easily be talking bollocks.
Because really, truly, they don’t want that. They want passive little worker drones, used to jumping through hoops, passingtheir little tests, leaving school to go on to get shit, poorly paid McJobs with no future.
Yes.
Annie,
As a child protection social worker driven by deadlines and bureaucracy I sympathise. New Labour remind me of Thomas Gradgrind from Dickens' Hard Times. They take the joy out of learning, they believe children are empty vessels to be filled with facts. This New Labour crew have no heart, have no humanity and I fucking loathe and detest the lot of them. For them if a thing can't be bought and sold then that thing has no merit. The sooner they're gone the better. Not that I want the Tories back, that would be simply replacing like with like. What we need is some strikes to cheer us all up. And maybe some victories too. I wonder if we might see a bit of fighting back this year...
xx
I always remember some TV programme from ages ago when they got Sir John Harvey Jones into troubleshoot businesses, and for some reason they sent him to a school. He instantly recognised that the children were bored out of their skulls by the dumbed-down maths on the curriculum, and instead found them something more challenging to do and they loved it.
I don't believe the kids that the Daily Mail loves to attack are dumb, but I do believe they're being let down by the very things you've described. My dad just retired after decades in academia – another area that's been fucked up by successive governments. He'd grown increasingly gloomy with the bureaucracy and the drop in standards.
Interesting remarks from Andrew Motion here, talking about the gaps in cultural knowledge that make it harder to teach literature at university level. The problem seems to be not just that they don't know the Biblical references - it's that they've had all the intellectual curiosity walloped out of them by the exam system. They've got to the stage where they think they don't need to know the Biblical references, because they're not on the syllabus.
Our education system in Ireland has fallen into a mess of a very different kind, and more and more people I know are considering teaching in England as a viable career option. But it's the very circumstances you're describing here that put me right off. An over-emphasis on schemes of work and lesson plans takes all of the spontaneity and joy out of teaching, and ends up leaving children short-changed, and teachers feeling robotic. I don't blame you for wanting to get out of it at all.
I've only been a teacher for a few years but I'm already beginning to blame it all on management consultants.
I don't think it's exams - and I don't think it's for want of having teachers who are inspiring or subversive. I think it's the rise of management consultants and the way that their way of doing things has infected everything in sight in society.
When I was at secondary school in the early 80s I remember doing exams every year. Possibly more than once a year. I can't remember what my teacher did with the results - maybe just filed the bloody things.
Now, however, a teacher wouldn't get away with that. It does seem that the 'management' insistence on being able to measure and quantify improvement has infected everything. And having evidence. To show how targets have been met. So learning objectives are in (as are plans). And 'value-added' as a way of measuring schools' performance.
I can't help but think that some Great Social Experiments (like education where, for crying out loud, *you* are educating other people's children, on behalf of the state and God alone knows who else is going to do it) don't really benefit from overdoing it with management consultants' best practice...
None of that helps you, of course. And maybe I'm a bit luckier teaching 11-18 year olds - i can usually find ways to be a bit subversive... even if it's just to satisfy myself!
God that's badly written. Maybe I'll have another go later...while I'm sitting about with one arm as long as the other on a quiet half-term break.
Get back to work, you lot!
I think the whales is right about the management consultants thing. It seems to me that, in the last 25 years or so, there has been an alarming increase in "inspectorates" of one type or another within the public sector. Many of these bodies seemed to consist of failed practitioners who, unable to hack it at the coal face, have turned to assessing the work of their previous, more competent colleagues.
I heard the Andrew Motion thing too. My reading list for university included the Bible. I wonder if this is still common practice.
Thanks, everyone. Back home now - will answer you shortly.
Re management consultant culture. Giles Coren has a brilliant rant here
QE, I don't know - I used to know, but now I'm stuck.
I agree on the systems. What I don't understand is how other countries seem to manage their education systems just fine... We also have a lot of pressure in London not seen elsewhere, in the UK, especially in London, in terms of the amount of children who come in not speaking English. It would take someone courageous and visionary to see that our system is not appropriate for them. The DCFS does not abound in courageous and visionary people. And systems always seem to work top-down, when they should be bottom-up. In schools, that means starting with the children,not with the 'outcomes'. I'll say it again - the people in charge of education have no idea what education is, what it is for - how can they proceed with their systems without this basic interest?
Management... my unlucky experience of management has been it's people who aren't brilliant and inspiring at what they do who go on to become managers, (and if they are, they're in the wrong place) but bureaucrats and bean-counters. This does not give me confidence that they know what they're talking about when it comes to teaching and learning.
Arabella, I know. Girls have been poorly served all around - did you know that when more girls started passing the 11+ than boys, they raised the pass rate for girls without publishing that fact? On the other hand, there was home economics for girls back then... (Seriously, I do wish they'd bring in cooking in primary schools, the kids love cooking and you could show them healthy eating.)
Me too, BiB, but I think the way things are, what we are doing is the exact opposite of teaching them how to think.
Thanks, Quink. Sometimes I think I'm paranoid but it's good to know other people think the same.
Hi Dan. You have my sympathy too - it must be like banging your head against a brick wall. I can't stand them either - no wonder people don't trust politicians when they only ever seem to be interested in what they are seen to be thinking and doing, and not what they're actually doing. They have no beliefs, no skills. Why don't they listen to the people in the frontline? I enjoyed the strike in the summer, I thought we were going to have a General Strike with the nurses and everyone, that would have been amazing, but the recession seems to have put an end to all that.
B, but I know how much work goes into it and how good the teachers are, how hard they work - if standards are declining, it goes back to an obsession with targets - we are not salespeople and the kids are not profits, I don't understand how you can apply this kind of business model to schools.
Tim, well EXACTLY - as someone who was always a big reader, and went to university to study Eng. Lit, I HATE the literacy hour - it's a way of killing a passion for reading and writing stone dead. (Have been trying to read my kids Charlie and the Chocolate Factory since September, they ask for it every day, but there is no time because the curriculum is so tight.)
Thanks, Andrew. There were lots of Irish girls on my teacher training course, I got the impression that it was a lot more laid-back and down to earth in Irish schools, are you telling me my impression's all wrong? Boo!
The Whales, not badly written at all. Agreed on the management consulting. I know you share my pain. Marsha, in no other job do you have people watching over your shoulder and telling you what you're doing is wrong the whole time... I wouldn't mind if it was people I really admired and respected. Why should I care what Ofsted thinks - they let down Baby P, didn't they? I care more about what the parents think, or what my students think - but I'm not allowed to tailor things to their needs...
Eh? I wasn't talking about a business model. Just having the creativity squeezed out of teaching, and kids not being expected to think independently.
I thought I was agreeing with you...
Oh yes I know, I was agreeing with you! Now I read it back, it looks like I was having a go at you, when I was (as usual) having a go at the government - I think it's their applying a business model to education that squeezes the creativity out of it.
Phew, lucky I'm not a writer...
As in, because I can't write very clearly, not having a go at writers or anything.
I seem to have foot in mouth syndrome today.
That's ok, alles klar. It is so fucking depressing, the sheer waste of kids and teaching talent.
I remember a friend's mum, who volunteered at a special needs school saying that all the staff nicknamed Ofsted "Offsex" because that's what an impending inspection did to them. Ofsted would oversee what they were doing and then complain that the kids weren't learning enough French... Let alone that they struggled with English.
Montessori schools must be inundated with teaching candidates... I did see somethign ages ago about parents setting up their own mini school. I wonder if that was the way forward, though it probably sounds like a nightmare to you. Maybe teacher-led mini schools? Oh I don't know.
The academia stuff has been utterly ridiculous too. The Powers That Be would decide that my dad's department was the same as "x" subject, so they should get the same budget. Never mind the fact that his department could only teach and function with considerably more expensive equipment than was required by department x. Gah. GAH!
Oh good! Offsex is good. As another blogger said, they descend like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. I think if I was a parent I'd seriously consider home-schooling. Your poor dad - this is what is frustrating, people who are good and experienced at what they do get burn-out from dealing with this nonsense - one of my colleagues, who always loved teaching and is a really brilliant, inspiring, natural teacher, is ending her career on a real downer, feeling like she's failed, because she doesn't fit into this crap system. I do wish I'd gone into Steiner schools...
What about a Waldkindergarten? They have them in Berlin. Maybe one on Hackney Marshes?
Yes, the kids she was helping with had to be communicated with via maccaton, and Ofsted complained about their lack of French communication...
That sounds fantastic. I sent the link to a friend doing nursery training at the moment. Who knows...?
Unbelievable! They are morons.
Someone in Scotland got a grant to set one of the waldkindergaerten up – there was another piece about it somewhere. People drove from miles to bring their kids.
Have you seen the film Granita de Arena (I'm no spanish speaker, that might not be quite right) -- it's found at corrugate.org. It is about globalization and education, specifically in Mexico but it made me realize that you are right, *they* do not want to educate everyone they most certainly do want worker drones.
Good luck.
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