The depersonalisation of education

As a teacher, I firmly believe that the best way to get the most from children is to really get to know them as individuals. As a parent, such an intimate professional knowledge of what makes my child tick is the least that I expect. Indeed, I suspect that even this government has the same understanding given the manner in which they press the idea that 'every child matters'. However, endless meddling and bureaucratisation of education have led to a very different state of affairs.

Success is now measured purely in terms of A-C pass rates at secondary level. To a degree I understand this. After all, if children leave school with more qualifications then they have a greater chance to pursue a successful future. However, the measure of success is not pure and the outcomes are rendered unreliable due to consistent dumbing down of standards, a pretence of equivalence between subjects of massively different nature and the micro management of process. All of this is effectively enforced by a politicised OfSTED whose assessment criteria now include not just an assessment of outcome but of process. This has led effectively to a state approved methodology in the classroom.

The methodology is not without its merits. After all, objective focussed teaching and learning are surely desirable when properly applied. However, too many teachers, encouraged by an inflexible orthodoxy, teach to objectives regardless of the children in front of them. Due to the centralised expectations placed upon them, teachers are increasingly strait-jacketed by their own lesson plans - having little regard for the particular needs of the individuals in front of them. In dwindling supply are the truly individual teachers who can inspire and impart knowledge (where the curriculum has not removed it) on the basis of their own professional skills. To be such a teacher now is to take a risk and to be labelled as some sort of pedagogical fifth columnist. Nanny knows best how to teach children and woe betide anybody who departs from the approved Whitehall methods.

Of course all of this, in turn, creates a massive bureaucracy. Bureaucrats to advise the teachers, others to montior they are teaching as they are instructed, others to monitor the monitors.....

Education in the state sector has become an extension of central government with the civil servants the stasi of the system. Your child is but a number on the league tables. The classroom has become a large Orwellian farm where timid shepherds lead timid animals. The problem is that the farm is led by a remote and uncaring corporation that is leading its lambs to the slaughter, rather than fattening them up to deal with the world outside the farm.

Introduction

I am an experienced secondary school teacher and the aim of this blog is to share thoughts about what really happens in education. A prolonged culture of externally dictated initiatives and targets has made education less personal than ever, and 'success' is, in fact measured in a manner which has become trite and damaging to young people.

Teachers are, in my experience, generally very good people who really care about children. However, once they lost the responsibility to self govern effectively and to determine the direction of education policy, the faceless bureaucrats took over. Success was no longer determined by the healthy relationships between teacher and pupil with the reward of seeing a child advance, but had to be quantifiable and based on the whims of bureaucrats. Byzantine attainment targets and programmes of study replaced local curriculum policies aimed at local youngsters, colourful lessons became sanitised by identical lesson styles to be delivered by automatons, children became 'learners' determined, not by the holistic content of their whole being and personality, but on the basis of spurious targets which, in themselves, are based on shaky science. No wonder our children are so unhappy, when the warmth of the informal has been replaced by the relentless attainment testing of the clipboard carrier.

Your children became statistics to be graphed (I believe that is now a verb in the brave new world of education), as opposed to wonderful individuals to be nurtured.

It is this philosophical change which continues to depersonalise education and to take away the joy of education. This blog, will talk about what happens in education on the front-line, free of the apocryphal window dressing of the bureaucrats.