‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ – Or ‘Educational Mediocrity Tolerated’?
In a school, perhaps one near you, we need great teachers – but once they get there, they’ll no longer be needed, says The Primary Head…
One of the joys of reading the DfE’s recently published White Paper – thrillingly entitled ‘Education Excellence Everywhere‘ [PDF] – was spotting all the hollow phrases that read as though they’d been concocted by a pumped-up advertising agency executive.
The document is laden with the sort of commercially viable soundbites that would easily trip off the tongue when delivering a conference speech, but which when thought about for just a second, actually offer very little value or direction…
Educational Excellence…Somewhere?
Take, for example, the concept of chapter 2: ‘Great teachers – everywhere they’re needed’. Now, when I first read that, I took it to mean that no matter where the school is, you need great teachers. Marvellous. I mean, it’s obvious – but true. Every school needs great teachers; therefore, everywhere, great teachers are needed.
But when you get on to actually reading the chapter, you realise this is not what the white paper is getting at. It says, ‘Educational excellence everywhere depends on having enough great teachers, wherever they are needed.’ So, what they really mean is that we don’t need every teacher to be great – just great teachers where they are needed.
When you break this down further it becomes even more confusing, alarming and downright daft. If you want ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’, then surely you need great teachers everywhere and not just where they’re needed. If you don’t – if you have some mediocre teachers knocking around the place – then you haven’t got them ‘everywhere’, which means what you’re really trying to achieve is ‘Educational Excellence Somewhere’.
The statement also implies that there are some schools out there that shouldn’t bother trying to employ great teachers. The White Paper doesn’t go on to determine how many of these schools might exist, but there must be some because it only wants us to have ‘enough’ great teachers to work in them. This would suggest that the White Paper’s tagline ought to instead read, ‘Educational Mediocrity Tolerated.’
An ingenious plan
I am, of course, being pedantic. What the White Paper is trying to say is that some schools are really challenging, and that it would seem, based on evidence, newly qualified teachers are not hanging around to teach in these schools.
The White Paper, therefore, contains an ingenious plan to strengthen the quality of teacher training. Teachers will now have to spend more time working in schools, training and developing their practice before they can be accredited. (Call me an old cynic, but that sounds rather like the BEd honours degree.) However, there won’t be a national standard of training. There will be a national set of ‘performance expectations’ (as there are now), but any school, academy chain or initial teacher training company can invent its own system of additional accreditation processes, and that’ll be just fine.
It will – here’s the White Paper enjoying its use of the word ‘autonomy’ again – be up to individual heads to decide what this looks like, if it’s needed and even to determine when it will be achieved. To avoid wanting to make it sound too woolly, however, this process will then have to be ‘Ratified by a high-performing school’.
None of it matters
What is unclear, though, is whether these high performing schools are the same schools that don’t require ‘great teachers’ because they’re not needed. Or are they the schools that need great teachers the most, because they aren’t yet high performing enough? Or, if a teacher is not judged to be great enough for the school that ‘needs them the most’, will she then be shipped off to a school that doesn’t actually need great teachers? In the end, as for much of the White Paper, it all becomes rather meaningless. Particularly when, after 38 strong points about how improving teacher recruitment, retention and standards is at the heart of everything, this point is made: ‘Academy headteachers will continue to have the flexibility to determine what requirements they make of any potential teacher for employment – including whether to make this accreditation a mandatory requirement or not…’ So, to put it simply, none of what you’ve just read actually matters. It is all just white noise, buzzing relentlessly in the background. Strong sentiments belied by the repeated notion of autonomy and freedom. The government just wants things to get better, but can’t be bothered to actually put concrete things in place.
So don’t waste your time. Focus on what your children need, no more, no less. And try to enjoy teaching, in spite of the politics.
The Primary Head is the moniker of a headteacher currently working in a UK primary school. Follow him at @theprimaryhead
