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.