As a Headteacher I caught the beginning of this government’s disastrous policies regarding education. Mr Gove sent us careering back to the 1950s with an outdated knowledge-based approach. The curriculum was narrowed, syllabi limited and children put through a narrow range of tests like pegs in a slot. What comes out the other end are sausages out of a machine. Forget skills and qualities. Forget values. Forget the whole child. All that matters are crude exam results.
Teachers were reduced to cogs in a machine. They were trained to teach in one way only. All flair, individuality and enjoyment went out the window. The three part lesson was raised on the altar and worshipped with the clipboard.
Then the pressure was put on. Pay was cut, conditions of service worsened and pensions slashed.
The workload was made monstrous. The marking regime created hours of extra tedious work. The average teacher is swamped with work. They are trying to cope with sixty hour weeks where their whole life is consumed by work.
I have relatives in teaching. They either are reducing their hours, giving up responsibilities or looking for a way out (abroad, part-time, private schools, or early retirement).
They are worn out, fraught, demotivated and see no satisfaction in the career.
It is an unmitigated disaster.
a. When we look back at the teachers who inspired us they were the ones with flair, eccentricity and who were interesting. The ones with time for us. That is being battered out of teachers in the modern military style, one size fits all.
b. No two children learn in the same way. The uniformity of the teaching mechanism will fail them. What we need is variety. More of the same is boring.
c. What society needs are skills and qualities. The modern world has knowledge at its finder-tips. Knowledge has been downgraded (it is still important but nowhere near as important). We need to train students to cooperate, work as a team, use IT, develop technology and scientific skills, value creativity, be tolerant, be trustworthy, caring and tolerant, be good at solving problems and be great at lateral thinking. Our strength as a nation lies in our inventiveness and skills.
d. The international education (PISA) tables used to bludgeon us are so narrow as to be ridiculous. Why cram kids, like Japan and Korea, to memorise pointless facts. That is not education.
This rigid 1950s model is a disaster.
Teachers have been castigated by the Tory media. I despise the lies – no child left my school unable to read, write or lacking in basic maths skills, no matter how disadvantaged they were.
It is no wonder that teachers feel unloved and morale is through the floor. What is there to attract anyone in?
Very little indeed.
Too true.
Of course, everything was rosy pink singing & dancing under Labour from 1997 – 2010 ?!
Occasionally during that period I would come into contact with 17 year olds who had just left school and were looking for work. I was shocked by the numbers that could not write properly and failed basic arithmetic tests. I couldn’t blame any government for education results – but I could blame the parents. Sometimes I would meet a parent of someone we were having to get rid off and there stood the problem.
Comparatively it was. Teachers were properly paid and valued. Their morale was high. The curriculum was balanced and there were huge strides in whole child education and progressive methodology. There was a valuing of variety and a great philosophy underpinning it. Every child was important. There was a huge injection of money into buildings and equipment.
Under Thatcher it was leaking roofs, poor pay and poor curriculum. Under Gove it was back to more of the same.
The move to Free schools and Academies was political – purely intended to take power away from local authorities,
The down-side of Labour was the increase in bureaucracy and the lack of trust in how money was spent. Then there was the stupidity of the Specialisms and all those silly initiatives.
But if I had to choose there is no doubt – the Tories are a disaster. They only value the bright kids and do not care for State education. As far as they are concerned anyone with any worth goes private.
I am sure that there are a lot of inner city schools where there were immense problems. I am sure that there were kids with social problems and cynical families who did not value education who left school without qualifications or basic skills.
My school was a comprehensive boys’ school with a full range of ability. Nobody left without at least 5 GCSE’s – 80% had 5 or more A*-C.
You’re right about parents – some of them need shooting. They need to take much more responsibility.
I went to a comprehensive school – it had about 1,200 pupils.
My year (about 200 pupils) had loads of kids that left at 16 with nothing like 5 passes in anything. I wouldn’t know how a GCSE compares to an O level, but it’s inconceivable that 80% of my year were passing 5 exams. Some left with nothing at all.
The School that my two Sons had to attend was a disgrace, it was the time of Blair and apart from three Teachers the rest were a load of crap they did not care. One afternoon I had an interview with one and as I was speaking to him he put his feet on the desk, I was so disgusted. I told him I was there to discuss my Son not his bad manners I told him to remove his feet from across the desk. As I said only three Teachers in that School cared and were any good, one even came to the Funeral of their Father to comfort them. This was Labour Opher, but the Teachers could not care less.
I think that a lot of the comprehensives were simply too big. Once you get above 900 kids you lose that personal touch. I reckon between 700 and 800 gives you the family feel and enables you to become a family while still having enough choice of subject.
You also need a healthy 6th Form for aspiration and to set examples of intelligent civilised behaviour.
The trouble with a lot of comprehensives was that the brightest kids were lost to public schools or grammar schools. It deprived them of the full range of ability.
I’ve seen bad teachers and poor teaching but I’ve also seen brilliant teaching and caring, dedicated staff. There’s no excuse for rudeness or laziness. That’s down to the Headteacher and Senior Team. Sounds like they needed sorting out.
I look at the funding and philosophy. Labour are by no means perfect but a whole lot better than the Tories.
Andrew that doesn’t surprise me. I think standards have risen substantiality. A lot of effort has been put into strategies, support, philosophy and styles of teaching. That is what I find so frustrating when I see a lot of all that good practice being thrown away.
Have to agree with your analysis, your points are spot on, though I think both parties have presided over a slide downhill. You’ve inspired me to do a blog on education, cheers.
Cheers Dave. Always good to hear from you.
It does not matter how big or small the School is, the rudeness of what is supposed to be a Teacher who puts his legs across a table in front of me while I am trying to discuss my Son is more than rudeness it is ignorance. Both my Sons were/are very intelligent, when my youngest Son had a bad fall and hit his eye off an iron cast floor radiator he caused an injury which he still has to this day, despite giving all the information I could to the School and his problem of not seeing 100% out of one eye apart from a couple of Teachers he was shoved to the back and left. He now runs his own Internet Business, as for my eldest he was and is also very intelligent but pushed to one side when his Father died, no excuses on that score, my Son needed encouragement and never got it apart yet again from one teacher in particular. So don’t tell me Opher the brightest Children were lost to Public Schools, Comprehensives had bright Children in the case of my Sons School thgse Children were forgotten. This was Labour not Thatcher.
It does not sound as if that school was worth a hoot. There’s no excuse for such rudeness that needs severe disciplining. Both your sons should have been routinely tested and supported. If they had an eye disability that should have been addressed. Bereavement would have triggered support counselling and a close watch being made. Some schools are better than others. It sounds as if that was a poor one.
I was a supporter of Ofsted. They picked up on things like that and forced schools to get better. It is only recently that they have focussed on education dogma and become too rigid and intransigent.
We had no choice in the School the Boys went to it was their Catchment area. The School was the Teachers and apart from three that taught the Boys the rest could not be bothered, they got paid that was it. A School is its Teachers you know that. It was David had the eye injury and I was continually writing letters talking to the School when they complained about his writing, I told them from the start but no one listened. The Boys did better out of school.
That school sounds atrocious. I think with Ofsted and the Local Authority you would have received better treatment these days. Certainly I’d like to think so. Their attitude was appalling.
By the time I was going to secondary school, the 11 Plus had been abolished some years previous.
I first attended a posh private fee-paying school and I absolutely hated it. My mother knew this but my dad was abroad with work a lot then – obviously he was paying for all this. After 2 terms I managed to persuade mother to change my school to the one where my friends went to. I remember my old man going up to have a look round the school for himself. This comprehensive school was so much better in every way. It had only been open for 2 years before I started. and it had everything a school could want. It was on a country estate with loads of parkland and about 6 grass sports pitches for rugby, football, hockey, cricket etc. tennis courts, ash pitch for practice football, gymnasiums, swimming pool, dedicated wings of science labs, several in-the-round music rooms etc. It was brilliant and voted the best Comp state school for a few years running.
But what a Comp school cannot do, as far as I am aware, is make kids pass exams, so that’s why we had a fair share of non-achievers. They were either too stupid or too disinterested to care less about exams and were leaving asap. By 15, they were already separated from the other kids and kept in separate classes to minimise their distractive behaviour from the others.
We had technical classes for kids that didn’t want to do the classical subjects, so they could learn metal and wood work skills on lathes etc. Some were too stupid for that equipment so we would see them from the 1st floor windows out in the school grounds with a spade digging a hole. Sometimes, halfway through another Friday afternoon double-Latin lesson, well buried into Ovid’s Metamorphosis’s, I wished it was me out there digging that hole, too.
On the other hand we had loads of really bright kids. Several of my friends went on to be Professors in Physics and Architects. I didn’t….
The old Comprehensives were not always good at getting everyone through exams, though some were. They have got a lot better. Motivating children is difficult, particularly if they come from areas/families who do not value education and do not buy into society. I know from talking to teachers from Hull that there are families whose whole philosophy is how to manage the Welfare State in order to maximise benefits. They see no need to work let alone gain qualifications. That is one area I would agree with the Tories on. The Welfare State needs overhauling to stop people abusing it.
Part of the job of a comprehensive is to ensure that everybody, regardless of ability, can achieve and has a reason to try hard. There are lots of ways of doing that. My school was very good at doing it which is why we had such good results. Our results were on a par with a Grammar School – though they creamed off the top 8% and we had the full range.
We wrote nobody off, motivated and valued them all and got everyone qualified.
My area had the opposite problem. I reckon 90% of the pupils came from the new middle class, all lived in bought homes, didn’t know what poverty was etc. I knew boys that didn’t need to care about exams because they were going to be working in daddy’s company. Some 6th formers drove better cars than some teachers. Shortage of money or social amenities just wasn’t on the agenda.
Yes, there’s a lot of that in the country. What worries me is that we’re heading into a global market. Travelling to India and Africa I’ve seen the value the kids place on education. It’s their way out of destitution. They’ll work their socks off (if they had any) to get qualifications. Hunger and misery are great motivators.