Today the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL)
roundly condemned the Educational policies of the Coalition government as they
passed a landmark motion of No Confidence in Michael Gove (Education Secretary)
and Michael Wilshaw (Head of Ofsted). For the uninitiated, the ATL is known as
the most moderate of the Teaching Unions and up until recently had not taken
industrial action for over three decades.
The other Unions (NUT and NASUWT) have also announced a
ramping up of their own industrial action calling strikes as well as
voicing their own criticisms of Mr. Gove’s Educational Reforms. To many outside
the profession however, teaching is a soft option with short working hours,
long holidays, comfortable pay and a cushy pension.
For Teachers and their Unions the issues are broadly centred
around three areas:
·
Workload
·
Pay (Including Pensions)
·
The General Direction of Educational Policy
As a Teacher I hope to add as much clarity to this growing
debate as I can in a [relatively] short blog post. I do not contrast the
profession with situations in other industries since I know everyone works hard
– too hard. Nonetheless, here is an example of our government’s “more-for-less”
policies in action, forget the media bias against benefit claimants and immigrants, the Coalition are
the biggest something-for-nothing merchants in the country!
Workload:
A day for a good or outstanding Teacher is as follows:
Arrive to work at 7am to set out lessons and prepare for the day. After doing
this, going through and responding to e-mails and having whatever briefings /
meetings and morning duties that are normal for that particular school it is
time to teach somewhere between 8.30 and 9am. Teaching is the fun bit of the
job, but with upwards of 22 possible hour long lessons each week there is little time for
anything else until the end of the day, with the exception of a bite of lunch
or a coffee break perhaps if there is any time - after dealing with student
queries, any behaviour issues or anything else that may have arisen.
At 3.15, 4.15 or 5pm depending upon where you work it is
then time to hold detentions before you have to attend any meetings scheduled
for that day (the limit is one per week but this is now routinely ignored by
schools. Then any phone calls home concerning achievement (the fun ones),
concerns regarding academic progress, or concerns regarding behaviour.
Once this is done, preparation for the following day
commences. This cannot be done entirely over the weekend since (A) there simply
isn’t time; and (B) you need to know what your students have understood during
the day in order to prepare appropriate lessons. This also means that marking
has to be done, but this is a job for home.
You get home, have dinner and then
settle down to marking. In primary schools for example, Literacy and Maths
books have to be marked every day. Even allowing for only 5mins per book, a
class of 30 takes a combined time of 300 minutes for both subjects, or five
hours. But you aren’t finished there either.
Once this is complete and written feedback given you then
have to prepare the following day’s lessons. Different activities have to be
planned for as many as six lessons for different groups. These activities must
all lead to the same points but in different ways so that all leaners can
access the topic. This means planning work to stretch higher ability students;
Writing frames and supported tasks for lower ability students; Language
resources for students whose first language is not English; And additional
materials and tasks for students with additional needs such as dyslexia. Each
lesson must also include opportunities for Spiritual, Moral, Social and
Cultural development as well as Literacy and Numeracy – in all subject lessons,
yes even art, it’s not just drawing anymore!
Teachers are also responsible for the safety of students,
child protection, a range of after-school activities, assessing and reviewing
additional needs, completing student reports and attending Parents’ Evenings
several times each year. Furthermore, in direct breach of the negotiated
workload agreements from 2003, Teachers are now expected to attend additional
meetings and training, design and implement classroom displays regularly (very
time-consuming), collect pupils’ money for excursions or charity events, investigate
absence and a range of other tasks that should be undertaken elsewhere in the
school.
By now, if I have described the situation properly you have
begun to realise there are simply not enough hours in the day. For this reason
every Teacher I know sacrifices at least one day every weekend and often more. “Ah,
but the holidays make up for it.” I hear you say….
Unfortunately, no. Our government likes to regularly change
our national curriculum including the content of the courses every year, the
methods of examination (exams, coursework etc…) every year and the way they
want us to deliver lessons (the OFSTED framework for this has changed twice in
the last five years). All of this means that vast swathes of holidays are spent
catching up on work that it wasn’t possible to complete during the term or
planning in order to figure out a way to jump through the next set of hoops
that the government has moved tantalisingly out of reach.
Pay:
This is a relatively easy one. Government pay freezes and
attacks on Pensions now mean that Teachers pay is now only 85% what it was in
2010. Meanwhile, the Pension age has increased to 68 and Teachers are expected
to contribute more and receive less. All in spite of the fact that the Teachers’
Pension fund was one of the very few which already paid for itself due to
earlier increases in pension contributions under the previous government in
2007, when Teachers were guaranteed that no further changes would be necessary.
Mr. Gove also plans to introduce performance related pay
from September, without any consultation with the profession or its
representative Unions. Again, he has not considered the wider context that many
Teachers are responsible for students for whom education is by no-means the
first priority. Students who are the victims of abuse or domestic violence,
students from families in the midst of breakdown or living in poverty. Clearly
he believes that the over-simplistic figures produced by exam results which
reduce children to numbers on a spreadsheet are enough to determine the standards
of living of those who work hard to educate them. One wonders how many strong,
talented Teachers will now choose to teach in schools from poor or challenging
areas.
For many Teachers the biggest issue here is the Pension,
whilst it would be nice to receive the average pay increase of the private
sector (circa 2%), most Teachers in my experience do not object to contributing
some of their earnings for the sake of the wider economy. However, I know
no-one in the profession who believes that continuing to teach until 68 is
realistic, especially with the increasing demands that have been discussed
above.
The General
Direction of Educational Policy:
Teachers get into teaching for a myriad of reasons. However,
they only stay in teaching because they enjoy working with young people,
particularly the opportunity to make a difference in young people’s lives. More
and more however, teaching seems to be reduced to an endless monotony of ‘teaching
to the test’ and lesson observations. Both of these destroy the less tangible
facets of the job such as building positive relationships with young people and
facilitating their personal growth - there is no longer time.
I have already mentioned the immense workload that Teachers
bear, but this has to be viewed in a context where every lesson is either
observed or observable meaning that any deviation from this programme is
impossible. Teachers now work in an environment where not a minute can be
wasted, and where checks are regularly carried out to ensure that it is not.
There’s no room for digression and no room for discussion beyond what the Teacher
is forced to plan in a regimented fashion (even down to the questions that they
will ask) prior to the lesson.
In this climate there is of course no room for student
individuality let alone bad behaviour, and to that end students are endlessly
drilled to make them compliant. They are lined up in silence up to 20 times a
day. Uniform is checked at the start and end of every lesson, and talking about
anything other than what is on the curriculum is strictly prohibited. Only
impeccable behaviour is accepted on the corridors at breaks and lunch-times and
these are rigorously planned by leadership teams across the country to ensure
they have as little impact upon “learning” as is conceivable.
Children are no longer allowed to be children. They are
herded relentlessly and indoctrinated every hour of every day so that the
educational system can provide compliant and hard-working Human Resources to
industry. The results they achieve in their exams appear increasingly to be
little more than a measure of the extent to which they have learned to comply
with authority. For some reason, no-one in the Department for Education seems
to have considered the idea that this industrial scale repression of young
people might actually be responsible for what the majority of Teachers describe
as deteriorating behaviour over the last two years.
Whilst few Teachers are comfortable with this process, it is
the individual educator themselves who is forced to foist this de-humanising
and inhumane routine onto their charges. Off-topic talking in your lesson? That
student is disengaged, time has been wasted and you must improve. Student late
to lesson? What are you doing about it? Why haven’t you planned a lesson that
fully engages all students? Hold on, there must be a magic wand around here
somewhere…
The more ideological concerns are also evident in the ever
changing curriculum. Mr. Gove’s view runs contrary to five decades of
educational research and development, he would have Teachers teach children to
recite facts and only facts. Understanding is secondary according to the
government which is fortunate since as 5-7 year olds will soon have to learn
about Parliament and the Monarchy, the likelihood of students so young understanding such complex topics is fairly remote.
The Big Picture:
There are many other issues that I could cover here, but
there simply isn’t the space. Essentially it comes down to unequivocal
enforcement of the government’s programme no-matter how misguided, no matter
how damaging. The only thing that matters is the exam results, students have
ceased to be viewed as young people, and now are seen purely as materials to be
moulded, tested, re-moulded and re-tested.
Teachers are over-worked doing a job they didn’t sign up for
on vastly reduced pay. The job is rapidly becoming a forced process of exposing
children to a stressful de-humanising routine, and they have no choice. Any
dissent and the authorities are ruthless. An unsatisfactory lesson can lead to
months of intense and pressure-filled capability proceedings, and a school
failure at OFSTED leads to the prospect of Special Measures or worse still, becoming an Academy. Should this
happen, all bets are off. Teachers pay and conditions are transferred to their
now Private Sector employers and they are often required to re-apply for their
own jobs. There is no compunction for Academies to hold to the nationally
agreed pay and conditions which in practice means that they are circumvented to
an even greater extent.
Teacher’s lives are becoming a pressure cooker filled with guilt and misery, and
these are the people looking after your children. Teachers no-longer prepare
children for their lives ahead, they are forced to indoctrinate them ready for
the tests ahead. To be fair though, it could be worse for the Teachers. With
pressure from the age of five. Revision, tests and homework from day one.
Summer schools extended school-days, after-school classes and booster sessions
in the holidays, I would hate to be a child today.
Are Lazy Ineffective Teacher Failing Your Children? No, the
government is failing Students, Teachers and the rest of society. It is time
for us all to stand up and put an end to this madness.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21829950http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21895705
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jan/15/teachers-pay-performance-michael-gove
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/nov/28/pensions-public-sector-pensions
http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/curriculum/nationalcurriculum2014
