Teachers - Slaves to the System?

Before I go any further on there’s something you should know…I love being a teacher.

Being in a classroom and witnessing ‘lightbulb moments’ gives satisfaction and delight like no other job. I’ve learnt something new every day – a topic I’ve covered a dozen times or more can suddenly be brought sharply into focus by a student who finds something within it that I have never realised before.

I enjoy the back and forth banter that goes along with teaching a group of students; in-jokes and wacky group dynamics sometimes reduce me to tears of laughter.

Nowadays the tears aren’t quite so happy. Neither mine, nor the colleagues I’ve regularly seen fighting back tears in the staffroom, weighed down by the pressures of a profession out of control.

One of the major issues is time, or the lack of it, in which to do the job.

Everything needs to be done now, preferably yesterday, in triplicate, to satisfy the ‘data monster’ and the obsession with becoming a good / outstanding school.

Teachers will know all about ‘directed time’ and what it means, but for those who don’t, it is the surprisingly small amount of time that teachers are actually paid for. It is 1265 hours over the course of an academic year.

A new teacher (outside London) is paid about £17 for each of these 1265 hours. This might not seem too bad given the minimum wage being significantly lower, but this is not just a starting salary for a graduate, but a post graduate with extra training and a specialist post graduate qualification.

Still, those in teaching know that it is IMPOSSIBLE to do the job without going way beyond those 1265 hours.

A ‘bog standard’ classroom teacher should have about 2.5 hours of time a week on their timetable (PPA) allocated to plan, prepare and assess. In other words: plan lessons, create resources and do all their marking. The rest of their time is spent teaching, being a tutor, in meetings, or on duty at break time. Directed time does not include lunchtime; teachers do not get a paid lunch break, despite often working through it to provide activities for students, prepare for the afternoon lessons or any number of other tasks there is not enough time for.

A classroom teacher has 22-23 hours of lessons on average per week and may be required to teach PSHE, or provide other educational activities, during tutor time.

If a teacher were to spend just 5 minutes planning for each of those 22-23 hours of lessons this totals 110-115 minutes, leaving just 35-40 minutes per week of directed time to create resources and mark everything their students have produced during the week. Oh, plus write reports, answer emails, enter data into the latest colour coded spreadsheet or any of the other myriad of things needing to be done.

Using this simple mathematics it is demonstrably clear that the way in which teaching is structured in the UK means that teachers are expected to work unrecorded amounts of overtime, every week, in order to complete the tasks needed to avoid being put into capability measures.

I’m pretty sure any teacher doing only 40 mins or so of marking a week would soon find themselves in a dire situation, buried under an avalanche of unmarked work, and five minutes per lesson really is not enough to address all of the skills, plan all the different activities and embed the differentiation required to suit the multiple strands of ability within the average class, even if it is finely set. If it is a truly mixed ability class then planning and resourcing will take even longer.

Just imagine what would happen in schools if all teachers worked only the 1265 hours of directed time. The whole system would collapse.

What actually happens is that most teachers work an extra 2-3 hours per day or more, at weekends, and in the ‘holidays,’ just to keep up with the required planning, preparing and marking - working somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week. Often MANY more.

This extra unrecorded work reduces a newly qualified classroom teacher’s hourly rate to about £10 per hour and a classroom teacher at the top of the upper pay scale to about £18 per hour.

Apparently, teachers are professionals, but how many other professions would work so many unrecorded hours? Would a solicitor do that – would they get so far with sorting out a legal situation and think, “You know, I need an extra few hours to work on this, but I really can’t charge my client for that time,” – is that a realistic situation?

Yet money is not what I am concerned about.

The terrible cost of this unrecorded work is felt in the home lives of teachers and their families. Too many teachers are burning themselves out, and their chance of a decent home life, due to the pressure of fulfilling the, quite frankly, impossible demands of a job that has spiralled out of control due to ever changing regulations and ever-increasing demand for data.

Fortunately I have no children, so I have not neglected them in my need to keep up with the demands of the job. I fear for colleagues who do have children. Especially those who stay at school late into the evening, desperately trying to conquer their mountains of marking so that they can give timely individualised feedback, which can then then be responded to by students in order to create the demanded “dialogue”. When do they get to be with their children and watch them grow up?

However, I neglected myself, and I know I am not alone.

I reached a tipping point.

I became unwell - suffering from ‘Work Related Stress’ brought on by trying to keep up with a workload that is impossible to keep up with.

Is it any wonder that graduates are shunning teaching for professions where you: endure less pressure; don’t have impossible demands made of you; are not political footballs; are not required to be the cure-all for the ills of society?

SATS 2016 - The end of childhood?

Year 6 Children in UK have been suffering the start of SATS week today. These are children who, if you didn't already know, are only 10 or 11 years old.

There has already been quite a bit of controversy over other SATs tests, with a 'Kids' Strike' on May 3rd involving tens of thousands of children from Year 2 (age 6 - 7) whose parents pulled them out of school, deeming the tests too hard and unnecessary.

Even learned academics have not been able to agree about the right / wrong answers in the SATs tests, particular in the sample SPaG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) tests, with groups of PhD qualified linguistics specialists disagreeing on the correct answers to a test designed for children.

I worry that this is just the start of a potentially dangerous situation.

There is an increasing issue with the mental health of children in modern day western' society and, whilst there are many factors which affect children, it seems clear that the mishandling of the education system is increasingly becoming an issue.

Today, reports are coming in thick and fast from heartbroken teachers and parents about the effects of today's reading test on 10 and 11 year old children.

Remember...we are talking about CHILDREN.

Classes full of children have not been able to finish the paper, with one school that describes itself as a "good" school (no doubt via their OfSted rating), finding itself in a situation where only 2 out 28 children could finish the test.

Other teachers are reporting children sobbing, shaking and even vomiting, such is their reaction to the stress and confusion caused by these ridiculously hard tests.

David Cameron recently announced that mental health services would be improved by his government. What do I have to say to that? They'll need to be improved, as a whole generation of children are having their love of school, of learning and precious self-esteem SHATTERED by these tests. The knock-on effects of their mental health is very worrying.

The tests are too hard.

I worry that they are designed to cause failure as part of the government's drive to force schools to become academies. The Secretary of State for Education, the 'Wrong' Hon Nicky Morgan MP, has announced that schools and local authorities which underperform in these SATs will be forced to become academies.

This comes just days after a a U-Turn on the White Paper which was to force ALL schools to become academies by 2022, no matter their circumstance or level of success, good or bad.

It seems this government has played a long game, covering its bases, by implementing tests which will guarantee what it wants - schools failing so that academy status can be spun as their saviour.

Once this occurs how long will it be until, like private schools, academies are given permission to ditch the SATs entirely, leaving just those schools left in Local Authority control at the mercy of these abhorrent tests.

What next? 

Will the tests will become even more "challenging" to create further failure and further "opportunities" for these schools to become academies, in a self fulfilling spiral of failure and political spin-doctoring?

Lest we forget, the losers in this situation are the CHILDREN.

It is these children who will be left, not through any fault of their own, with a shattering feeling of failure.

These children have not failed. 

The education system has failed them. The DfE has failed them. The government has failed them.

The consequences? A generation whose mental health, education and future may have been irreparably jeopardised.

Schools for Sale ! Forcing the Academy Agenda

Until fairly recently I was a teacher in the state education system. It's a career I'd invested twenty years of my working life in, plus four years at university getting a degree in my subject and a teaching qualification.

I've put a lot of myself into teaching and leaving twenty years before I had envisioned doing so was hard. As a result of the many pressures on the system, education has changed and so have I, neither for the better, so it was time to go.

Looking back over the past twenty years, with the benefit of hindsight and the bonus of some time on my hands for once, I think I see a process that has been going on since the start of my teaching career and that is nearing its endgame.

What is that endgame?

The total privatisation of the state education system via the forced academy process, as announced by George Osborne in the 2016 budget.

I think I became a teacher for all of the right reasons - I didn't fall into it or have it as a backup plan. It was my first choice from my late teens onwards. I saw it as a vocation and the financial comparisons with friends who went into industry / business have never bothered me (OK - maybe once when a friend in banking cash-bought a flashy car using his yearly bonus, but that's it).

I was inspired to teach by a teacher I had in my early to mid teens. She saw my potential. She kicked my arse. She made ME see my potential.

I wanted to do that too.

As kids in the 80's my friends and I never felt any sort of pressure at school and we went to a school which had an excellent reputation to preserve. We didn't have target grades (if there were any we didn't know them) and we certainly didn't feel the gut wrenching fear and anxiety that accompanies GCSEs nowadays.

Why is that? No league tables - so no overwhelming pressure on school, headteachers, teachers and students that, if YOU don't get your 5 A*-C the teacher, headteacher and school would be in trouble.

No matter what commentators may say, kids in schools are VERY aware that their individual grades make a HUGE difference to them and to the school. Extra, and often compulsory, classes after school and in the holidays, run (unpaid) by teachers, all serve to reinforce this culture of high stakes testing as the be all and end all of students' lives.

Having to console and support students, even BEFORE they take their exams, who are crying, suffering with anxiety and depression, or even self-harming, has become a day to day occurrence in many, if not all schools. Colleagues in other schools regularly share harrowing experiences supporting their own students.

So why has it changed?

I firmly believe that there may have been a long term plan, across successive governments, to devalue the state education system in order to make it ripe for plucking and privatising.

I'm no conspiracy nut. I don't believe 9/11 was an inside job etc. but I do worry that the pernicious and Machiavellian interventions of politicians in the UK education system has been designed with the endgame of a big sell-off to profit making organisations.

League tables, with their regularly changing criteria, have made teachers an easy target for criticism. Couple this with a media onslaught on teaching, blaming the profession for many social ills and making them responsible for solving so many others, has made the job all but impossible to succeed in.

How often, when watching some terrible news item about kids' lives, have you heard the phrase "Schools need to..." or "Schools should..." used?

Nowadays teachers are not just educators. They are: surrogate parents, social workers, counsellors, financial advisors, spotters of extremism (!), administrators, social workers, arbitrators, mediators, language specialists, a walking encyclopaedia, form fillers, fundraisers, examiners, scapegoats, relations officers, accountants, musicians, artistic directors, petty cash clerks, report writers...

Occasionally teachers manage to squeeze in some some lessons.

Even with all these added responsibilities, teachers do what they have always done: work hard, adapt, achieve...and that has been the problem. It has meant that further changes have been needed to make failure more likely...if not inevitable.

This is where I feel the plan to make schools and teachers fail becomes clear.

League tables initially measured 5 A*-C grades and many schools improved.

New stricter measurements of 5A*-C including English and Maths were introduced and so schools focused on these (to the detriment of other subjects) and many improved.

OfSted inspection criteria were changed and changed again, leaving teachers doubting what they needed to do in order to pass muster. The 'Satisfactory' rating was changed to 'Requires Improvement' and therefore previously 'satisfactory' schools and teachers became failing schools and teachers.

It's the only job where something marked as satisfactory really isn't.

All the while, despite the battle cries of: "Education, education, education," schools have been coping with real world cuts to budgets, salaries and greater and varied demands on their time and resources. 

There has been an influx of English as a second language students, but have schools been given funds to cope with this? No, but they are expected to improve grades anyway. I don't have an issue with migration, but I do have an issue with the needs of migrant children not being funded adequately and schools carrying the can for it.

School buildings have been ignored and left to rot due to budget cuts, but schools are expected to improve anyway. PFI has diverted millions away from school budgets into long term rents, just so they can have a building which is not dangerous, unless of course it is in Edinburgh...

Despite government denials, there is a MASSIVE crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, with thousands of potential teachers not joining the profession when they see, via the media, the vitriol that would be poured upon them. 

Many thousands of younger teachers, already in the profession, are quitting after a short time due to the relentless, excessive and unrealistic demands of workload and expectations, or moving abroad to teach in foreign climes where their skills and dedication is appreciated. 

Many older teachers are quitting as they are burnt out, disillusioned, or have become very ill as a result of the relentless and excessive demands of unrealistic workload and expectations.

Is this is part of the plan?

When the state schools system has been brought to its knees, which I fear is not too far away, the academies will step in and be seen as the 'saviours of education'. The current government is continuing to spin this propaganda to the public.

Initially, like academies now, it will be not-for-profit, but there will be boards of executives taking large salaries and using their own companies (as is already happening) to supply resources and consultants, taking much needed funding away from each child's education.

It is a system ready-made for abuse.

Once the public gets used to academies running schools, legislation will slowly change to allow these companies to make profits, and that is when children's education will really suffer.

Instead of taxes being paid to educate children, some will be siphoned off for dividends and bonuses.

It has already begun with the new White Paper, but there is time to halt this tide.

How?

Keep schools under the control of local authorities so that there is accountability, transparency and so that every penny goes towards what school should be about - education.