And the rant goes on

Oh thank God.  I thought it was all our fault.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/sep/05/nick-clegg-britain-expects-teachers

(The) State (of) Education

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/25/secondary-school-streaming

Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Reading For Pleasure

Last week of term but instead of relief and euphoria we had tears, nose-bleeds and raging frustration.  Way to go, Senior Leadership Team.

Good teachers want to inspire pupils, to instil in them a love for their subject.  Like most non-selective secondary schools, we have a number of pupils for whom reading is a struggle and a chore, who come from homes where there are no books and where the feeling is that reading is what you do at school.  Library lessons have therefore become something of an essential and a highlight for our Year 7s, an opportunity every so often to spend three-quarters of an hour immersed in a book they have chosen, something which really interests and engages them.  It emerged this week that this is Wrong.  Children should not be allowed to spend forty-five minutes reading.  They should be interrupted on a regular basis to be told what their objectives are, which level they're on and how much progress they've made since they plucked the book from the shelf.  Heaven forbid they should be left to concentrate, to be absorbed, to lose themselves in the written word.  What good would that do them?
Similarly, a bottom set Year 9 class has been reading Blood Brothers this term.  Two of the most challenged and challenging children in the class have been reading the main roles and taken them to their hearts.  I have never seen either child as engaged with or enthusiastic about anything as they are about playing Mickey and Mrs Johnstone and their acting has been tremendous.  But their teacher has been hauled over the coals because Blood Brothers was not listed in the Scheme of Work for that term. The children had already completed the Scheme of Work for that term.   Heaven forbid they should be allowed to enjoy anything.
Questions need to be asked about what we are teaching our children and why. 

Lambs to the Slaughter

This week in La-la land has seen our New Year 7 Parents' Evening.  Hours of dressing it up and pretending it's a normal school.  Exhausting.  I watched the children, tremulous and excited, clutching at their parents as they met their new form tutors and explored the corridors and classrooms.  Every September we are fed these innocent, eager little creatures and every June we regurgitate them as hard-eyed, diaffected tramps and thugs.  It is a truly terrible machine.

I also stood in the shadows of the hall and listened to the headteacher's speech.  He promised that in every lesson the children would receive 'high-quality teaching'.  I wanted to step out into the light and ask whether that included the 30 or so lessons a day which are taught by non-specialists or indeed non-teachers.  The cover work left for one particular Year 7 Science lesson this week was 'Complete the worksheet and do page 70'.  Page 70 of what?  And there were no worksheets.

My colleagues are tearful and depressed.  The Senior Leadership Team cares only for results and nothing for the people charged with bringing about those results, whether they are staff or children.  This is not going to end well.

If Music Be The Food of Love

"The last thing anyone wants to hear," a teacher shrieked at a roomful of lively Year 8s today, "is the sound of children singing!"
Well yes, heaven forbid.

This week a theatre group came into school to work with forty Year 10 boys on understanding Shakespeare through performance.  I had feared disaster.  The boys chosen for the event were borderline underachievers, disaffected, too-cool-for-school hard cases.  Within minutes the actors had disarmed them with humour, energy and a willingness to play the fool.  Within half an hour the boys were completely engaged.  I have never seen them so engrossed for so long.  I have never seen them smile so much.  This is what education is about - not Shakespeare specifically, but opening minds, channelling energy, raising self-esteem.  This is what we should be doing.

According to our Great Leaders (and Ofsted), children failing to meet their target grades is entirely their teachers' fault.  Nothing to do with social/economic deprivation or low parental expectations.  Nothing to do with parents being drug addicts/mentally unstable/in prison.  Some children barely make it through the gates with half their uniforms on because they are carers for their parents, or misbehave in school because it is the only place they can let off steam.  Some are out of their minds on weed, or already have dysfunctioning livers due to their alcohol consumption.  But if they don't mange to attain a C grade it will be because their teacher didn't ask them the correct question one Friday afternoon in July.
 

Teacher Training

Today in the asylum formerly known as school, 39 lessons were not taught by teachers.  Or at least, not by the teachers who should have been teaching them but by Imposters in the shape of four supply staff and three cover supervisors.  It was the same yesterday and will be the same tomorrow.  The Real Teachers are on courses, in meetings and heading for the hills in a coach with (a handful of) the children.  Meanwhile, the remaining pupils are in classrooms with Imposters desperately trying to deliver work which is meaningless to them and manage teenagers disaffected by their Real Teachers' repeated absence.   Over the course of, say, a term, some children will have spent more lessons with their Imposters than with their Real Teachers. Interest, discipline and continuity of learning become idealised concepts and with them the prospect of more than 35% A*-C grades and the reputation of the school.  It is a pity that the Senior Leadership Team making the connection between teacher absence and more than 35% A*-C grades is also an idealised concept.  One wonders whether Ofsted will similarly struggle with it.

Meanwhile, the remaining teachers are rounded up and herded into Twilight Inset to be told they are failing by someone incapable of correctly punctuating a powerpoint presentation - which she reads to them.

Quotes of the day:
Year 9 boy, top set, History cover lesson - "Who's our King?"
Year 10 girl, being introduced to Shakespeare - "People couldn't write 400 years ago."
And my current favourite - "Miss, how do you spell GCSE?"

Teaching Practice

This week, at the asylum formerly known as school, my colleagues are being flayed alive by the torture which is Self-Review.  It involves the arrival in their lessons of jack-booted members of the Senior Leadership Team and someone holding a netball.  The teachers, either inwardly gibbering or stony with rage having spent 117 hours preparing the lesson, employ their years of experience and specialised knowledge to conduct the children with board markers as batons and make beautiful music for forty-five minutes.  Jack-boots and Netball make tight-lipped ticks on their clipboards and ask questions to which they have no idea of the answers.  They sweep away with barely a backward glance, leaving the teachers needing to lie down in a darkened room and the pupils to continue selling each other weed or getting each other pregnant.  The ensuing silence where there should be feedback is instead punctuated by ever more querulous demands for current grades, reports, target grades, residuals, predicted grades, aspirational target grades, last week's data, this week's data, seating plans, lesson plans, blood, guts, sanity. 

They are, of course, running scared.  Papering over the cracks with ... well ... paper in fear of the Ofsted monster.  The answer, apart from Death by Data, is Intervention.  Take the pupils out of their English and Maths lessons to give them lessons in English and Maths.  Assuming they don't vault over the back fence on the way.  The other answer is to send the teachers on courses.  As many as possible and all at the same time.  And make them attend meetings, when they need to be teaching.  The teachers fall down with the plague or gather their pupils to them and escape in a coach to the hills.  Leaving all the lessons to be covered by people who are not a) teachers or therefore b) subject specialists or c) trained to manage a roomful of mobile phones.

I mean, it's not rocket science, is it?
It's not even BTec Science.
Or O Level Biology failed by someone in 1978.
Teachers need to be allowed to get on with teaching.