The school in which I work/suffer/despair is shrinking. When I joined it, half a dozen or so years ago, there were around a thousand pupils on roll. Now there are not much more than six hundred and September's intake looks smaller still. The popular (among Senior Management) view is that we have a grammar school down the road and 'outstanding' comprehensives a couple of miles away. These are all over-subscribed of course, and their rejects trail dejected towards us. But this coming year they have been granted extra classes, in what is quite possibly a government incentive to boost higher achieving schools and demoralise the rest until they close.
What is it like to work in a demoralised school?
Well, there is no money. So the top floor of one of the buildings is to be shut down and its teachers relocated. Whole areas of the school are being sold off. Experienced - and therefore expensive - staff are bullied to the point of breakdown and forced to take early retirement. No one is replaced. Other staff take longterm sick leave and their classes are left to fail. Email is the communication method of choice, removing the option for staff to talk to each other, to support each other in a comforting and sympathetic way, unlike the 'support' offered by Senior Management, which involves sticks and ropes. Feelings, opinions and points of view are not tolerated in any way. The children themselves exist only as units of achievement and their 'progress' used as a club to beat the staff not as an aspiration for the pupils.
When I think of the school as shrinking, in terms of morale as well as numbers, I think of the shrunken heads of the Amazonian rain forests. It might not be quite what we look like yet. But it is how we feel.
