Quisling and schools

I was interested to note today that Home Secretary Alan Johnson has sacked the independent expert that he appointed, Professor David Nutt, because he gave him an opinion that he did not want to hear. Closer to home for teachers it was also noteworthy that Barry Sheerman MP recently referred to the Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls, as a 'bully'. Indeed, the shift towards more authoritarian control in schools and the stifling of professional opinion does appear to come from a rotten culture based in Whitehall.

Indeed, schools are now only deemed successful if they are able to meet a multitude of targets which are centrally dictated, the latest particular focus from OfSTED being on safeguarding arrangements. Whitehall appears to micro-manage the LAs, which in turn micro-manage and bully the headtachers, who in turn micro-manage and bully the staff. The results on the front line are catastrophic.

Like anything imposed from a faceless and remote body, priorities that are set too often do not address local need and the targets and aims that are dictated from Whitehall are subject to the laws of unintended consequences. Teachers worth their salt understand this, knowing that the chase for numbers leads to dumbing down, that intelligent youngsters are often left to themselves as 'intervention' focuses the whole school to concentrate on C/D borderline pupils, thereby leaving the low ability to fend for themselves too. They know that the 'learning to learn' agenda is a profligate waste of time and that that the whole culture is bureaucracy and target driven, not child centred.

Regrettably, the majority of teachers where I work and either blind to much of the reality, or disinclined to challenge prevailing wisdoms due to fear. Indeed, in the big window dressing definitions of 'improvement' that exist in education, the headteachers too often exercise an almost totalitarian control. In my school this has included the sacking of 4 staff teaching harder academic subjects whose grades were not outstanding (but this was not part of a general trend for the individuals concerned). Teachers are also subject to a myriad of control measures. There is a tick list for break duties saying how many minutes late each teacher is, we are told exactly how every lesson must be uniform in the name of consistency, 'learning walks' are pretty much weekly to ensure that all policies are being followed and anybody questioning the massive explosion of paperwork, which impinges on preparation and assessment time, are immediately reported to the head.

Perhaps this is the saddest change of all- the development of quislings. A network of colleagues, eager to to progress in a new apparatchik, will quickly run to the boss to report dissent. The result is that those with independent professional standards who are by no means disloyal, are called into the office of the headteacher and threatened with the sack or told to fall in line with immediate effect.

The results are obvious. The independent, free-spirited, intelligent and thoughtful colleagues who wish to place children at the centre of the educational process regardless of ability are bullied and are starting to leave, even in a recession. Some have gone to private education, others have simply left teaching altogether. Many are making plan to get out of the state system. As Professor David Nutt bears testimony to, it has become career suicide for professionals to be independent or honest, or indeed to act with integrity.

The BNP and teaching

Ed Balls has announced a review into the necessity of banning teachers from being members of the BNP. Put simply, he is suggesting that one lawful political party should limit the rights of another because it does not agree with it. I believe that it is already unlawful to be party political under the provisions of the 1988 Education Act and rightly so. After all, many of us who were educated in the 1970s and 1980s will surely confirm the fact that the image of the socialist teacher, wearing elbow patches and preaching left-wing views to the class, was not a product of the imagination. Indeed, good teachers should not impart political views and they should surely allow youngsters to develop the skills to make up their own minds. That being the case, if a teacher were to be found preaching party political propaganda, they could presumably be pursued under current laws and provisions.

I find it deeply unsettling, and an affront to democratic values, that an illiberal Ed Balls will seek to limit the rights of a legal political party merely on the basis of disagreement. We are supposed to be living in a free country respecting the suggestions of Voltaire who said. " I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Compare that with Chris Keates of the NASUWT who said, " All right-minded people understand that an agenda of hatred, bigotry and intolerance has no place in education."

So long as the intolerance and bigotry are not right-wing eh Chris?

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.

Accountability.

Further to my posting last week there have been 4 resignations from the teaching staff after results which did not fall in line with targets. Although in 3 cases there had been no indication of poor performance, and consequently no attempts to support it, the teachers felt it was better to leave than to face the harassment of the managers.

I repeat that I have no issues whatsoever with the removal of teachers who are demonstrably bad and who are damaging the life chances of young people. Nor would I have any compunction, as a manager myself, in dismissing chronically under-performing staff. After all, I may be a teacher but, more importantly, I am also father to 2 wonderful children. However, in the drive to increase GCSE results regardless of subject we are actually penalising certain subjects to the benefit of areas of study such as media, health and social care and sport. After all, there is a clear difference between a GCSE in French or Physics (hard and examination based) compared with the 4 GCSE equivalence BTEC Sport (easier and coursework based). Consequently, the latter meet targets much more easily while the former struggle to meet the unreliable benchmark that is set for them.

Of course, these problems disproportionately affect poorer areas, where young people are increasingly denied not only an academic curriculum but also the more intellectual teachers equipped to lead their aspirations. Whilst I do not decry the opportunity to study construction and hairdressing at school, I do lament the loss not only of the areas of discipline that allow poorer children to join the managerial classes, as well as the intellectual role models forced out by an insane targets system.

How teachers are unfairly judged.

Welcome to my first posting of the new academic year, and what a start!

Firstly, let me say that I am all for the accountability of teachers and the removal of those who are persistently bad. However, the manner in which teachers' targets are determined, allied to political meddling and a chase for GCSE numbers, is creating significant stresses and huge unfairness.

Basically, most school appear to use a measure from the Fisher Family Trust organisation to provide targets for their GCSE groups. For each child, a residual score is given calculated on the basis of actual result against predictions. In simple terms, if a youngster is predicted a C and achieves a D, the teacher is awarded -1, a score of 0 for a grade C, 1 for a B, 2 for a grade A etc. All scores are then calculated to give a residual result. Should that residual result be negative, the teacher is placed under pressure that is sometimes intolerable, for the most unfair of reasons.

Firstly, because schools should rightly be seen to have high expectations many of them use something called the FFT D indicator, which determines targets based upon the top performing 25% of schools which are deemed to be statistically similar. Likewise, for most schools, the targets are in turn set against pupil performance at the end of key stage 2 (junior school).
This raises 2 particular issues. Firstly, there is ample evidence to suggest that the results at key stage 2 are unreliable. The DCFS was rightly accused of being a significant contributor to previous SATs catastrophes due to political meddling and, with the stakes being so high, there is much empirical evidence that at the very least the KS2 outcomes appear at the expense of a broader education with significant 'test drilling' skewing actual educational achievement.

Therefore, we build castles on sand and set teachers up to fail. This is particularly the case in deprived areas (such as where I teach), as pupils who do not turn up for examinations, or are unprepared, can bring with them residual results of -6. However, there is little sympathy for the teacher with a negative residual, however it arises, as headteachers follow the slavish mantra that it is bad teaching that is to blame, not the children. Equally, it was noteworthy that the negative residuals came in the academic subjects, with BTECs doing particularly well. Funny that?

So what does this mean on the front line? It means that 3 teachers with thus far unblemished records have today been given the option of resigning with a good reference or facing competency proceedings. Welcome to the brave new world of staggering illusion and unfairness.

PS- I trade in no sour grapes here. I was fortunate enough to have a positive residual so I am left alone, at least for a while......

Author on holiday!

I shall be taking a well-earned break in Italy until the beginning of September. I look forward to bringing all the front line news from the first week of September!

Are you state sanctoned to meet children?

From October 2009 anybody who works with children (or vulnerable people) or wishes to work with them, be it on a voluntary or paid basis, will have to start to be registered under the provisions of the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). From November 2010, this listing will be compulsory and it will be a criminal offence to engage in a ‘regulated activity’ with children and remain unregistered.
The VBS will be administered by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), a new tranche of bureaucracy administered by more than 200 caseworkers and decision makers chaired by Sir Roger Singleton. The VBS will impact upon substantially more people than current arrangements and will include anybody who has interactions with children or the vulnerable. For a one-off fee of £64 (not applicable to volunteers), the ISA will check criminal records, convictions, referrals from employers and, most worryingly, ‘soft’ information not based upon conviction. Indeed, the ISA says that a strength of the scheme is that "it has access to non-conviction information from different sources when building a view of an individual's unsuitability to work with children or vulnerable adults". The checks will be necessary for anyone who has contact regularly, intensively or overnight, defined as once per month, 3 times or more in a period of 30 days or between the hours of 2am and 6am. Therefore, the scheme includes a diverse range of people such as doctors, taxi drivers, dentists and parents participating in foreign exchange programmes.
This latest infringement by the State into everyday interactions between human beings raises a number of serious questions. However, 2 points seem to stand out, Firstly, there appears to be an undermining of the rule of law and secondly the default presumption of inter-generational interactions appears to base itself upon a presumption of mistrust.
It is a sign of how deep-rooted the drift to authoritarianism has become when yet another collection of non- elected decision makers consider the ability to make decisions about the futures of others, free from the inconvenience of the rule of law, as a ‘strength’. Indeed, this further paves the way for those with allegations being made against them, but never proved, to have opportunity denied. Of course, even in the human rights dystopia that New Labour represent, the ISA will not have arbitrary powers and there will be a right of appeal to its Upper Tribunal. However, this will place a burden upon individuals to appeal against an allegation which has never been proven at any tribunal. Should such an appeal fail, which it may, then judicial review would be the legal check against the excesses of the ISA and how many people can afford that? Also, The ISA has indicated that it may consider unsuitable anybody who engages in conduct that endangers a child or vulnerable adult, or is likely to, by causing physical, emotional, sexual or financial harm. This includes having sexual material relating to children or depicting violence against people. At face value this appears to be innocuous and, in particular, possession of child pornography would render an individual unsuitable to work with children in the eyes of most right-minded people. However, possession of pornography ‘depicting violence against people’ raises worrying questions. From 26 January 2009 it became an offence to possess ‘extreme pornography’ under the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Under section 63, extreme pornography is defined as:-
- an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals
So, where does that leave the person who may possess pornography depicting bondage between consenting adults? Is this a de facto extension of the rights of the state, at the expense of the individual, into the bedroom? More importantly in the context of this debate, could a body of individuals, other than the courts, deny opportunity to people who may have a penchant for bondage in their private time with little effective route for appeal?
Also, any system which encourages, through expense and bureaucracy, a default position of mistrust is creating a toxic relationship environment which will surely poison natural rapport between the generations. Despite the remarkably low numbers of incidents between strangers and children (which CRB and ISA will likely make little impact upon), children and parents are encouraged to see every adult as a potential danger unless that adult has been state-sanctioned. Quite aside from the peculiarly depressing implication that every one of us is a potential danger and the consequential undermining of informal, colourful relationships, there is also the very real danger that parents may stop using their own discrimination and common-sense when they hand their child over to the paedophile who may not have committed any offence yet. That is surely a danger of the system- it does not catch the first time offender whose certification may induce parents to be less judicious than they normally would be.
Of course, the proponents of the schemes will reiterate ad nauseum that they are simply protecting children. Unfortunately, those with a vested interest in the new procedures will stubbornly refuse to see that, in fact, we are all less free and a touch more cynical as a result of the measures.