Imagine A School Where Bureaucracy Doesn’t Get In The Way Of What Matters
Give teach(ing) a chance. It’s not so easy, but you should try…
John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy trying to put in place other people’s plans”. At least I think that’s what he would have said, had he decided to do something meaningful with his life – such as teaching as opposed to fronting a skiffle band. He definitely would have been able to spell ‘beetles’ correctly for a start.
Each judgement of success – and there are now so many for schools and children – has become cruder, diminishing the value of the profession by increments. Nuance and context have been squeezed out of public consciousness. That is why, as a teacher, when you stumble across something unexpectedly brilliant, those around you will try to take it and formalise, it in order to recreate it ad nauseum. Their carbon copy will never emulate your original results – but they will have proof that something once worked.
Getting the job done
It’s time to refocus. Like a magic eye picture, we must see beyond the chaos and allow the true value of education to emerge. Prove to yourself that you can make a difference and that you care about the right stuff. Spread the word. Imagine. Imagine a school where every one of your actions helped you become a better teacher, and allowed the children to become better learners. Imagine a school that wasted no time in gathering evidence, but focused on getting the job done. Imagine a school with no bureaucracy. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I bet I’m not the only one…
The Primary Head is the moniker of a headteacher currently working in a UK primary school. Follow him at @theprimaryhead
But even with his basic understanding of phonetically plausible spelling, Lennon understood that bureaucracy often gets in the way of the stuff that actually matters…
Butterfly collectors
In the world of education this is often painfully the case. It doesn’t whether you’re talking about the school development plan, staff meetings, lessons or policies; new initiatives almost always fall into one of two categories – ‘sheer brilliance’ or ‘a total waste of time’.
If it’s the latter, then the moaning that greets this new initiative will most likely be down to one of four things:
1. It’s led by someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing 2. It’s too time consuming 3. It’s considered to be a box-ticking exercise 4. It’s a time-consuming, box-ticking exercise led by someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
It’s the ineffective lesson conducted by the teacher who is rigidly following her plan, rather than responding to the needs of her class. It’s the staff meeting outlining the new triple-response marking policy. It’s the website that has maxed out its bandwidth due to an overload of information about PE grants.
All examples of where education bureaucracy has become stronger than educational value. Why, as educators, have we become like butterfly collectors? When we see something beautiful, why do we insist on killing it and pinning it to the wall as proof that it existed? Why do we think dead evidence is akin to living success?
The answer’s simple. We’ve been made to care too much.
Showing how much we care
The teacher who over-plans has worked really, really hard because she cares that her lesson works and wants nothing more than to prove to anyone who’s watching that she can teach good lessons. The marking policy has been written by people who care about being able to see (and want to easily prove) that their teachers help and support their pupils. The website has been painstakingly updated to show the world that the school cares deeply about all facets of school life.
We all care.
We care about our accountability. We care about our jobs. We care about our schools. We care about showing how much we care, so we put in place as many defences as possible so no one can say that we don’t. Annoyingly, proving that we care so much means we are prone to miss what has been right in front of us. It’s not our fault. We have, in recent times, been forced to look at education differently. We have been pushed to take a narrower, more linear approach to education, while at the same time responding to the expectation that schools should tackle an ever growing set of social and cultural issues.
Each judgement of success – and there are now so many for schools and children – has become cruder, diminishing the value of the profession by increments. Nuance and context have been squeezed out of public consciousness. That is why, as a teacher, when you stumble across something unexpectedly brilliant, those around you will try to take it and formalise, it in order to recreate it ad nauseum. Their carbon copy will never emulate your original results – but they will have proof that something once worked.
Getting the job done
It’s time to refocus. Like a magic eye picture, we must see beyond the chaos and allow the true value of education to emerge. Prove to yourself that you can make a difference and that you care about the right stuff. Spread the word. Imagine. Imagine a school where every one of your actions helped you become a better teacher, and allowed the children to become better learners. Imagine a school that wasted no time in gathering evidence, but focused on getting the job done. Imagine a school with no bureaucracy. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I bet I’m not the only one…
The Primary Head is the moniker of a headteacher currently working in a UK primary school. Follow him at @theprimaryhead
