“Those on high will continue to fiddle with education until the joy is lost completely”
As long as children feel valued and make progress, let teachers get on with what works
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When I was first a class teacher, a long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was no national curriculum and what, when and how I taught was pretty much in my control. This made for an enjoyable and interesting time – for me, principally, though my children seemed to like it and the outcomes were good.
Since those halcyon days, however, teachers have come under ever-tighter constraint from DfE, Ofsted, and even their own leadership teams in the drive for higher standards. Don’t get me wrong – higher standards are a good thing; the way the drive is managed is too often a bad thing.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way; there are still opportunities to play to your teaching strengths and rediscover the joy of the job, as long as you recognise there is a bottom line.
My strategy as a head has always been to appoint really good teachers and let them get on with it. I have no fads with which to burden them, nor any preferred teaching style I insist they follow, being equally happy with formal, semi-formal, loose, very loose and downright floppy – so long as it works. By ‘works’ I mean children feeling valued, making progress and the vast majority reaching age related expectations. Simple, really.
Some school leaders, I fear, are control freaks: they’ve been given some power and, by god, they’re bloody well going to use it!
Even teachers who are already achieving great outcomes are asked to incorporate the latest whizzy idea – brain gym, multiple intelligences, learning styles, Singapore maths, head massages, thinking hats, Bloom’s taxonomy, flipped learning, metacognition, learning walks, colonic irrigation. (I made up the last one. I think.)
As a class teacher, I used to listen with genuine interest to the head’s new initiatives, nod in apparent agreement and then – when I realised it bore no relation to the daily harsh reality of teaching a class of 30 – completely ignore it and just crack on with old-fashioned interactive teaching based on sound subject knowledge, good behaviour and incremental learning, leaving the latest crackpot innovation to my more compliant colleagues.
I was the sort of teacher I hated when I first became a head. If the SLT isn’t busy being the bane of teachers’ lives, the DfE also can’t help sticking their oar and exercising some centralised control over what they seemingly regard as dangerously incompetent, free-thinking individuals poisoning the minds of the nation’s children in a lefty plot to inspire Marxist insurrection.
Fortunately, DfE plans usually founder on the rocks of baffled indifference, and, yes occasionally, Bolshie revolt from the professionals.
There are exceptions, of course. Every Child Matters was enormously popular with teachers, chiming as it did with their social consciences. Because teachers liked it, DfE (in the person of Michael Gove) got rid of it, presumably believing if teachers agreed with them, it can’t have been any good.
What the DfE seems to prefer are things that wind teachers up and grind them down. So we got another curriculum rewrite, featuring fronted adverbials and other irrelevant tosh from the 1950s, and a massive King James bible in every school. Did the DfE really think these things would raise standards?
I mean, all knowledge is useful, but fronted adverbials? Before I go any further, let me say I wouldn’t know a fronted adverbial if you wrote one on a rounders bat and beat me about the head with it.
Teaching is usually over-complicated by people who have never actually taught but think they can and feel duty-bound to tell the rest of us how to do it.
In fact, teaching is really simple – imparting knowledge, understanding and skills through didactic or carefully planned discovery methods which children can understand, recall and use – but hard work and problematic in practice. So those on high will continue to fiddle with it incessantly and unleash management consultants like a plague of bloody locusts eating the last scraps of joy from the job.
These snake oil salesmen make a good living from peddling magic bullet solutions backed up by pseudo-science and a few good jokes to make teachers believe this might be the answer. It really isn’t.
Teaching is hard graft and often you’re fighting against the odds. But it can still be hugely enjoyable graft and the odds can be, and often are, beaten.
My advice to teachers is this: you are the practitioners. Be a bit subversive. Children can fail or succeed in large part because of what you do – not what heads or the DfE do.
Close your classroom door, barricade it with your King James bible, take off your de Bono thinking hats, tell Bloom where to shove his taxonomy and practise some passive resistance to the latest diktats.
Get the right outcomes, yes, but get them in a way that you and your children actually enjoy.
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