Further Education

I did some supply teaching in an FE college.

My timetable was split between A-level classes and classes of overseas students (mainly Chinese) doing a pre-degree course which was more advanced than A-level. (It was taught with A-level books from the early 1990s, something I’d like to see explained by those who claim dumbing-down is a myth.)

The overseas students were a bit of a shock. Most of them (particularly the Chinese ones), despite having to work in another language, already knew most of what they were being taught. They were just going through hoops in order to get into an English university.

The A-level classes were closer to what I was used to. However, they were a lot bigger than sixth form classes. My experience in school sixth forms was that you could up results by piling on the pressure:  lots of homework, letters home, a constant refrain of “this is not like GCSE, you will have to study hard in your own time in order to pass”. The classes in the FE college were too big for this approach. You had to leave them to their own devices and too often this simply wasn’t sufficient. Too many were there for their EMA (this was before it was abolished) and an easy life. Too many had jobs in their spare time which meant that homework could not be set overnight. Too many had the low expectations that were normal in the local schools and no idea that college would need to be different.

The biggest difference was in how courses were managed. The scale of the college meant that nobody was paying close attention to whether kids were on the right course. A complex system of referrals was used to deal (slowly) with issues that would be dealt with informally at schools. This left kids, who were obviously destined to fail, stuck in classrooms where they wouldn’t learn. Students who failed very basic tests were given endless chances to resit. Departments were managed by lecturers who didn’t teach the subject in question. There was less micro-management than in a school – nobody ever wanted to see me teach – but there was also indifference as to whether the schemes of work made sense or whether the resources available were appropriate.

The department itself was friendlier, the culture more informal, and the level of conversation more intelligent, than school staffrooms. There was far more respect for the students than in schools. When it was announced that a student was absent due to being stuck in his (or possibly her) room with “gender issues” it was taken a lot more seriously than I can imagine would happen in a school staffroom. However, a lot of time was spent complaining about contracts. It was a given that the college would take advantage of lecturers. I discovered that the person I replaced had quit after a year there in a promoted post, in order to go somewhere he would earn less money. Others were talking about leaving, again because of pay and conditions. Eventually, I experienced it firsthand. My hours were totalled up at the end of the month and I discovered I was being paid far less than promised. My complaints were ignored, and I was passed from one person to another as the blame was passed round. Eventually I concluded that the problem was with the person who offered me the job lying to me, rather than the agency or an administrative oversight, and I quit. A colleague told me as I packed my bag:

“It will be the college that is the problem. They are always ripping people off. They almost went bankrupt last year and, for a while, we were wondering if we were going to be paid.”

I decided to avoid FE colleges in future.

The Failing Department

I do occasionally ask if anybody has anything they’d like to contribute to this blog. About once a year something comes in, although invariably from someone I know in real-life. This was written by an old friend of mine who is now a senior teacher at a church school. I think you’ll be able to guess which department he works in.

The Blessed Snowball Academy had a failing dept. Everyone at the school knew it. The teachers knew it, the parents knew it and the kids knew it; they told everyone they hated it. It was the maths department.

The school also has an outstanding department. Everyone at the school knew it this as well. It was the English department. “English good, maths bad” was effectively the school motto. The start of each year consisted of a meeting where statistics were waved about to support the ritual chanting of “English good, maths bad.”  Everything in the school was geared around this motto, and belief. The teachers in the maths department were regularly lambasted, bullied and harassed by pupils and staff alike. Pupils didn’t expect to behave, or learn in the lesson, so the teachers were in a constant battle to make the children learn. Staff turn over was high, only a few remained year on year. The local authority liked them though, they tried all of the new initiatives, current fads, creative ideas to stop being the school’s failing department.

A few years back, the Head of the Blessed Snowball Academy decided to overstaff the maths department by employing some teachers from other successful departments around the country while also getting in and recruiting the top NQTs available. The first thing they did was undermine the relationship between the local authority and the school and introduced “back to basics” education, focused on exam success. In the last few years the department has felt transformed.

After the last set of results the maths department had exceeded the FFTD target by 8%;  in fact their performance put the department in the top 5% of maths departments in the country. The “outstanding” English department had only just hit their FFTD target, and had dropped a few points form last year. So first day back at the start of year meeting the members of the maths department walked in -shoulders back, chins up – feeling that the hard work had been worth it. The talk turned to the exam results, and it was announced:

“If the maths department could have got all the students who passed English to also pass maths then we’d be 20% better off. So maths, you need to do more work to be like our outstanding English department.”

Or in other words: “English good, maths bad.”

Apparently, by not hitting the aspirational targets the department had used to motivate and inspire students, the maths department had failed; they were still the failing department. I wonder how many of the teachers will bother to stay.

The Outstanding School

For a short while I worked at Mallon Park School. OFSTED had rated it as “outstanding”. Its exam results were a little better than average (i.e. a lot better than all the other schools I have worked in), but given its intake this was a significant achievement. This was a school which served a very deprived community but achieved far more than similar schools. It was better than the other schools I have worked in, but it was still a battleground school.

It differed from my other schools in the following ways:

• SMT had real presence around the site. On every lesson change-over they would come out of their offices and go to the main thoroughfares of the school. During lessons they would pop into classes to keep an eye on students. They were known to, and feared by, the students.
• SMT were reliable. Not once during the time I was at the school did I feel a member of SMT had lied to me. Not once did I feel that something I had referred to SMT had been ignored.
• The conflict between the key departments and management did not exist. There were members of SMT and Heads of Year teaching in, and helping to lead, all the important departments.
• There was much better targeting of resources at key students. The results owed a large amount to correctly identifying which students would affect results and using early entry to ensure that as many of them as possible were prepared for their exams by the most senior teachers. There was a lot of “gaming” of the exam system, with exam boards being carefully chosen for maximum advantage.
• Those aspects of poor behaviour that senior management could confront around the school were far less of a problem. Uniforms were largely excellent. I never saw a mobile phone in a student’s hand while I was there.

Some bad features of the school system persisted even in an outstanding school:

• A significant number of incompetent but ambitious middle managers, failing to do their job and blaming classroom teachers for their failings. This was particularly noticeable in the case of some of the year heads who simply couldn’t teach and had no idea how to support teachers.
• An SEN department making excuses for bad behaviour. My description of INSET on SEN came from Mallon Park.
• Low academic and behaviour expectations for pupils. Outside of the current crop of target students expectations were shockingly low, particularly for the least able. Some of the bottom sets contained students who simply were not used to learning in lessons, and were quite shocked when I expected them to start working without first being nagged by a teaching assistant. Behaviour was still a massive problem for new staff.
• High levels of bullshit in teaching practice. The whole school were initiated into “Kagan Structures”. One department used WALT, WILF and TIBs. “Assesment For Learning” was widely interpreted as meaning “using mini-whiteboards” and “getting kids to tick boxes”.

The OFSTED designation “outstanding” has been used more and more in recent years. My experience of an outstanding school was that it was significantly better than the “good”, “satisfactory” and “notice to improve” schools I had worked in previously.  However, I don’t believe there was one teacher in the entire school who would have considered, even for a second, sending their own kids there. “Outstanding” probably does indicate that a school is not the usual disaster area. However,  often (but not always) it is still only good enough for other people’s children.

What I Didn’t Say During the INSET day on Special Educational Needs

To begin our INSET day we were directed to sit in departmental groups and given details of an origami model to make.

“What do you think the learning objective of this activity is?” we were asked.

“To make a paper model.”

“To work effectively as a group.”

“Excellent. What does ‘working effectively as a group’ mean?”

“It means everybody takes a turn and plays a part.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

What I didn’t say: “But that’s ridiculous. Effectiveness is to do with achieving your aims. How many people play a part is entirely different to whether people play that part effectively. The group might be at its most effective if only the most effective people contribute”.

Then we got on with our folding. The SENCO started shouting at the teachers at one of the tables, saying things which seemed to suggest he was motivated by sheer despair and hatred. I put my head down and ignored it. After a few minutes we were stopped and told the origami and teamwork was just a ploy, we were actually going to talk about dealing with SEN children.

“Did anyone think that argument was real?” asked the SENCO.

No hands went up.

“How did it make you feel? How would it make you feel if you were a child in a classroom when something like that happened?”

What I didn’t say: “Patronised”.

“Scared of the teacher.”

“Scared to ask for help.”

“Yes that’s right.”

What I didn’t say: “You do get that most arguments in classrooms are started by students? Are you aware that in year 9 there are several boys who start shouting at you the moment you ask them to work or to stop chatting with their friends? If you ask them to be quiet, or tell them why they need to work, they shout even more. If you try to punish one of them then he’ll pull out a card saying he has permission to go to the SENCO if he feels stressed. Those boys have become unteachable and it is your fault. Sometimes they look for some kind of excuse for the argument, like claiming they are picked on. A lot of the time they don’t even bother; the other day I had two of them go off at once because I told them I’d be looking to see how much work they had done at the end of the lesson.”

“Quite often, when a teacher shouts at an SEN student it is because the student hasn’t actually understood what they were supposed to do”.

What I didn’t say: “They have a legion of teaching assistants to do their work for them in this school. What’s to understand?”

After a few more attempts to blame the teachers the main speaker arrived. He was a “behaviour expert” who worked for the Local Authority. After a quick explanation of what challenging behaviour he asked us to discuss in groups and write down what students do to annoy us. Lots of sensible suggestions (talking out of turn, throwing, refusing to work etc.) were suggested.

What I didn’t say: “I know what behaviour most annoys me: Pulling out a card saying they can leave the room if they are challenged about their behaviour or effort”.

Then we were asked to do a similar exercise about what we do to wind up the students.

Answers were along the lines of:

“Telling them off when somebody else is also misbehaving.”

“Not praising their work.”

“Not explaining clearly what they have to do.”

“Giving them work that’s too difficult.”

What I didn’t say:

“Asking them to sit down.”

“Asking them to work.”

“Enforcing the rules.”

“What you need to understand is that behaviour is only the tip of the iceberg. The behaviour is just the symptom. The rest of the iceberg, below the water, is the cause of the behaviour. Their frustrations. Their poor social skills. Their home situation.”

What I didn’t say: “This is a model for natural phenomena, not the choices of human beings. We don’t have ‘causes’ we have motives: things that make us want to do bad things.  And all human beings have motives to do wrong, they aren’t caused by social or medical deficiencies, they are just part of what it is to be human. Whether we act on those motives is a question of right and wrong. You have to choose to do what is right and you have to resist temptation to do wrong. How are they going to do this if we act as if their choices are symptoms of an underlying condition beyond their control?”

“We should ask ourselves if their behaviour prevents them from doing anything else. Whether it causes damage or danger. Whether it causes distress to the individual themselves or harm to others. If the answer is no, then why try to change it?”

What I didn’t say: “Because we are not isolated atomised individuals; whatever one child is allowed to do will be copied by other children. Whatever is acceptable will become normal. Whatever is normal they will continue to do out in the real world. This will cost them opportunities in life. If we tell them that rules are not to be followed unless there is an immediate, obvious harm caused by breaking them, then by the time they try to enter the workplace they by adulthood they will be unemployable and probably criminal.”

“The important thing is to judge the behaviour not the child.”

What I didn’t say: “If you are saying that we should not write off any kid as irredeemably evil then fair enough. But you cannot separate a person from their behaviour.  From the point of view of other human beings we are our behaviour. That’s all we see of other people’s minds, their external behaviour. To treat somebody as if their behaviour is not part of who they are is to treat them as a machine not a human being.  Human beings get to shape their own behaviour, and it would be downright dangerous to tell them they are not responsible for what they do.”

“Now let’s talk about body language.”

What I didn’t do: Pull out a card saying I could leave.

The Hostile Observation

Before the observation

“Andrew, we need to do a performance management observation as soon as possible in order to get it out of the way. I’ll just focus on progress. Which class would you like me to observe? I’d like it to be during one of my lessons so I can get cover, I don’t want to lose any of my frees. It can be any class.”

“Well, my top set year 8s are my best class. I have them Friday and Tuesday.”

“That’s fine. Is tomorrow okay? Or would you rather I wait until the lesson after.”

“I’d rather you waited, as I’m very busy tomorrow. Is there anything I need to do? Do you want a lesson plan?”

“I’ll need to have something.”

“Is there an official lesson pro forma?”

“There is but you won’t need it, just give me a rough list of what you are doing so that I can remember the details when I write up the observation.”

“Okay.”

After the Observation

“That didn’t go very well. This was an important observation. All my paperwork goes to the headteacher. When you have an observation like this you should spend hours preparing it because it’s really, really important. It should have been an all-singing, all-dancing lesson. Overall the lesson was barely satisfactory. I was focussing on progress and I couldn’t tell that they progressed. When I say the focus is progress that means I expect to see progress at least every twenty minutes, so you should be getting them to do groupwork and holding up answers on mini-whiteboards. What you did might work normally, in fact your starter is something I will try and incorporate into my lessons, but it was very old-fashioned. They did a lot of work in silence, there were only three activities and you spent a lot of time explaining things to them.

Also this was a bad choice of class. It was a very small class and they were high ability so it is no wonder they worked well and behaved well and seemed really eager to work. You should have chosen a more challenging class. In that lesson you might have been able to see progress because you managed to see their work individually and ask them all questions about what they knew at the start and end of the lesson but that wouldn’t have been possible with a bigger class, so there should have been assessment for learning. Also you didn’t give out enough merits. You only gave them to half the class yet all the students were doing lots of work. They should have all had merits every time you saw them working well. If I was teaching them I’d have given them all about 5 merits each because they were working.

Your lesson plan was not detailed enough, I wanted it spelled out exactly where you were going with every single activity. I know I didn’t give you a pro-forma and I’ll take responsibility for that, but you need to plan properly for all these things. You are going to need to be observed again before the end of the week.”

Snow Days

I’ve had very few “snow days”, i.e. days where my school was shut because it was snowing, in my career. Mainly this has been due to bad luck or working for the kind of headteacher who, in the absence of any other kind of notable achievement, hoped to become respected for their ability to keep a school open.

Two experiences spring to mind though:

The Snow Day at Stafford Grove School

As usual I came into school early, the roads had been gritted and public transport was working in the immediate vicinity of the school but the school was covered in heavy snow and staff who lived further away, where the roads hadn’t been gritted, were likely to have trouble coming in. I got some work done in the department office, but started getting phone calls from other members of the department trying to find out if the school would be open so I went over to reception.

When I got there Maureen, the Deputy Head was sat there in the receptionist’s seat. She asked me to help take phone calls from staff and parents. She explained that if parents called we had to tell them that the decision had not been made yet whether the school would be closed or not.

So for half an hour I sat there, telling parents that until they heard differently the school would be opening and recommending they listen to local radio, just in case “anything changes”. I didn’t mention that the thing that might change would be the arrival of a member of staff able to make a decision. According to Maureen, the head couldn’t be contacted, nor could Claire the other, more competent, deputy head. Maureen didn’t feel she could make the decision herself (she had only worked at the school since the year I was born and, therefore, wasn’t experienced enough to make that sort of judgement) and until she was absolutely certain that hardly any staff could make it in, the school should remain open. As we sat there it became abundantly clear that every other school in the city was closing, even some of the schools with a reputation for staying open. The ice on the roads was dangerous and also the sheer depth of snow was so high that it was actually quite inconvenient to move around the site.

I eventually got away from the phones as other teaching staff arrived and somebody else got roped in; if the school was going to be open then I did have lessons to prepare. Another twenty minutes passed. Almost all the teachers were in, but a lot had struggled to make it due to icy roads. Students began to appear in the corridors, athough only in small numbers. Then the announcement went out: “the school would be closing to students”.

Members of staff who had struggled to get in went through the relief at having a day off, followed by the annoyance of realising that they had gone to a lot of effort for no reason other than the inability of the school to make a decision. Rumours went round as to what had happened. Maureen was believed to have been so bad at making decisions that she’d even been phoning retired members of SMT for advice. It was also believed that eventually Claire, the other Deputy Head had turned up, looked around at the state of the school, and said “Of course, we’re closing it”.

Still, now we were all in we could catch up on some work then leave, hopefully after the roads had been gritted. Then the message went round. The school building would be closing in twenty minutes everybody out. Staff who had already regretted coming in because the roads had been so hazardous were forced back out onto the same roads.

The following day the school opened, still under a blanket of snow, and despite lots of other schools being closed. Attendance was about 50% and some statistical jiggery-pokery had to be done to the registers to avoid admitting this to the powers that be.

The Snow Day At Mallon Park School (the most successful school I have ever worked in)

It started to snow during the previous day. Some other schools had sent students home, but as most of ours lived locally, and they had all made it in there seemed little to be gained by this. However, meetings were cut short and staff made it off site early. About an hour after the students had left the headteacher started asking people how they were going to make it home. When she discovered that I was taking public transport she offered me a lift, although she did warn me that she might have to stop along the way if she saw any students from the school misbehaving on the way.

In the car she quizzed me on how I would get into work the following day. When she realised that I left home long before any closure would be announced, she tried to make me promise not to leave my house until it was known for certain the school would be open, telling me that she did not mind if I was late. (To be fair, I evaded making this commitment as I hadn’t prepared properly for the following day, and would much rather risk having a pointless journey than risk teaching lessons without my resources to hand.)

The following day the decision was made early, and I was informed by text message in plenty of time.

The School’s on Fire

Year 11 are still here. Other schools have long since let their students go. But due to the chronic (and worsening) attendance problem the Metropolitan School can’t afford to let year 11 affect our attendance figures any more than they have already. Of course, in their hearts they know they should have already gone and as a result they are turning up in jeans, and instead of going to lessons they stand around in corridors playing a gambling game which involves throwing money at the wall.

Sometimes, like this morning, a few year 11 students accidentally turn up for a lesson. This causes all sorts of confusion. For instance, today my class of five Year 11s thought they were meant to sit around a table chatting about the Prom. Unfortunately I had planned to teach them a few things they need to know in order to pass their GCSE exam. Conflict was inevitable. I am glad to say I only had to get one girl, Rochelle, removed from the class. She repeatedly refused to cooperate with even the most basic instructions. While we waited for Call-Out to come and get her, the other students were keen to explain that it’s not surprising Rochelle wouldn’t do what she’d been told. No punishments of any kind were being applied to Year 11s at the moment. I pointed out that as far as I knew students had been excluded as recently as two weeks ago.

Rochelle spoke up “Do you mean me? I didn’t get excluded.”

“I’m sure you did, That’s what your Year Head told me. I’ll just look it up.”

Sure enough when I looked it up Rochelle hadn’t had an exclusion for an incident a couple of weeks ago. Yes, she had thrown her work on the floor. She had told me: “Fuck off, I’m not doing it”. Her acting Year Head, Jenny Goodyear, had told me she had a two-day exclusion. However, both Rochelle and the computer were telling me this hadn’t happened.

Not long after Call-Out had arrived and removed her (with some arguing) from the class, Clay Broadmoor turned up at door.

“Have you heard? The school’s on fire.”

“Really? Well you’d better get to your lesson before anyone thinks you started it.”

“I’m not going to my lesson. The science block’s on fire”.

Clay eventually left. The lesson ended and I sent my class out for break. A minute later an email arrived saying “Don’t let your classes out because of an incident in the science block”.

Some of my students returned. The order came through eventually for all year 10 and 11 students to go to the hall. (Other years went to a different part of the school). The science block was on fire. The students were to be released to go home. However, their parents would each have to be contacted by a member of staff first. Now we just had to explain this to a hall full of year 10 and year 11 students.

This proved to be impossible. As soon as the words “go home” had been uttered there was pandemonium. First there was loud and protracted cheering, followed by the out break of some kind of fight. Staff with mobile phones lined up to make the calls but students were impatient. Why should they have to wait? Students attempted to make their own phone calls or attempted to make a break through the fire escape (about 15 succeeded).

I had the misfortune to be right near the main door. Inevitably, for an hour, I was the bouncer on the door. Nobody else seemed to want this job. No member of SMT came over to do it. No Head of Year or Head of Department took an interest. No teacher who had been at the school longer than me gave me a break. As ever, by attempting to enforce the rules, I had taken on sole responsibility for a massive task. Most of the time I simply had to let out kids who’d been given a note by a member of staff or let in kids who hadn’t made it to the hall in the first place because they’d been wandering the school grounds as an alternative to lessons. Unfortunately, I was also confronted by the kids who couldn’t wait their turn. One gang of large students attempted to charge through me, and when I held my ground and shouted at them to sit down they just shouted back at me or told me my breath stunk. Chanel from my year 10 class came up to me, held her nose to indicate that she thought I smelt. (Yes, barely three hours since I’d had a bath and brushed my teeth I was being accused of both having body odour and bad breath. If you are at all familiar with children you’ll know that anybody who inconveniences them has bad breath, a body odour problem, a history of homosexuality and a fat mother. If you are familiar with teaching you’ll know that this kind of abuse is no longer only student to student but aimed at staff on a daily basis.) When I asked to see her note she told me to “fuck off” and then showed me her note anyway.

Eventually we got them all out. We all went back to our rooms to work. We wouldn’t be going home early, but four lessons being cancelled is a teacher’s dream come true.

It turns out it was three Year 9 students who set the fire. I’m amazed they found anywhere in the school to do this that wasn’t already full of truanting year 11s. Only one of them was a child whom I teach, but another was a boy who used to pop into my lesson occasionally to verbally abuse me. As it happens just two days before I had emailed Miss Rush, their year head, to tell her that these two boys were running around the corridors causing trouble. As it also happens there had been no reply and you can be pretty sure nothing was done about them.

Eight Out Of Forty-Three Ain’t Bad (If You’re a Member of SMT)

After six weeks of term in which my year ten class have continued to disrupt every lesson I decided I’d had enough. I found the worst few incidents of the last couple of weeks (being called a twat by Charlene and being told to fuck off by Daniel) and emailed SMT about it. I was surprised to get responses. I was not surprised that the responses consisted of passing responsibility to other people and/or denying knowledge of the incidents. Neither incident had appeared on the school’s behaviour database system despite two weeks having passed.

There were some incidents on the system. Madelaine and Will had been given a day in isolation on Wednesday (this is the standard punishment for being sent out of lessons). Madelaine had earned this by repeated interruptions and calling another student a “a pregnant bitch” and Will had earned this by refusing to stop singing while I was talking. The odd thing about this is that on Wednesday, when they were meant to be isolation, Madelaine and Will had attended my lesson and disrupted it. I raised this and was told that these students had been let out of isolation unsupervised to go and have injections. They then had gone to my lesson to disrupt it rather than returning to isolation. Evidently the pleasure they get from stopping me from teaching is not easily foregone.

At a tough school you expect to have lessons disrupted and you expect to get verbal abuse. You can also expect SMT and HOYs to ignore incidents referred to them. However, they usually act eventually when it’s every lesson for a fortnight and you are emailing them every day about what’s happening. This time it’s been six weeks without progress. Previously well-behaved kids are joining in. So I contacted my union rep, Diane, to ask to see her about what was happening. (Unions are actually quite good at politely asking why kids are allowed to victimise their members with impunity, that’s why Jim Bulmer the head at Stafford Grove was reputed to bully union reps with hostile observations until they left). She popped in to see me while I was in the detention hall. I was allowed out for a brief chat and the Deputy Head “just happened to” overhear. Before I knew it there was a flurry of activity and he was agreeing to meet me Friday afternoon to discuss the matter.

I did my homework. I compiled the 43 incidents into a handy spreadsheet. 17 had not appeared on the behaviour system. Of those that had appeared only 8 listed any form of action that had been taken.

8 out of 43.

It even shocked me to see how many incidents of verbal abuse had been ignored. That said it is the repeat offenders that make the inaction so depressing. Dave had walked out of 5 lessons without anybody doing anything to encourage him to stop. Daniel had been sent out of half the lessons he’d attended. Printed it out just made it obvious how badly I’d been let down by the system. How badly the kids in the class had been let down by the system.

On Friday I was surprised to see the Year Head for year 10 joining us. The Deputy Head and Year Head were soon promising to chase up certain students and let the year ten mentor assist in lessons. If anything they were too helpful now that the unions were involved – I had to persuade them that I didn’t currently want any help with my other year 10 class. As ever the excuses were the main entertainment value of the meeting. The Deputy Head talked at length (convincingly) about how the schools budget for Teaching Assistants had been underspent and how outside contractors had been unable to deliver the updated behaviour system on time. The Year Head was less convincing. Apparently the lack of action on her part was down to:

a) Computer errors that made incidents just disappear from the system

or

b) Other members of staff leaving the door to the Year Head’s office open, thereby allowing students to sneak in and remove referrals from her desk.

Of course, if you believe that you’d probably also believe that the main discipline problem in school is “low-level disruption” and that exams are as difficult as they were twenty years ago.

Postscript

The following Monday I got to see the full list of results from the first modular GCSE exam year 10 took in March. Out of the ten classes in the year group there were only two in which the majority of students had met or exceeded their targets. I had taught both of those classes. No other class had more than three pupils reach their targets. A number of my colleagues later explained to me that their results were disappointing because they’d had some poor behaviour with year ten recently.

With a Little Help from my Friends

I met up with a few old friends recently.

One of them is a councillor with responsibility for education (thankfully not “children’s services”) for a medium size unitary authority. He told me that he thought his authority was doing well, at least according to exam results. I pointed out that results cannot really be compared over time due to changes in exams and he accepted that it was the figures relative to other schools that showed progress had been made. He was also quite keen to point out that there were various groups, such as those responsible for The Cambridge Primary Review who were opposed to testing even though it was the only way to reliably judge whether kids are learning or not. I told him my view that schools were massively failing due to poorly thought out aims, such as inclusion, and idiotic patronising initiatives from both government and from private companies selling snake oil.

He agreed that SEN provision was a mess, but said that it all came down to money; Special Schools cost more. With regard to initiatives telling teachers how to teach, he asked if I was claiming teachers should have more autonomy, because if so then I needed to realise how terrible a lot of teachers were. I pointed out that my real issue was that the initiatives were nonsense. The people who implement initiatives are not any more competent, and certainly not better educated, than ordinary classroom teachers. There are classroom teachers out there with PhDs in psychology being told to implement “expert” ideas that actually contradict everything psychologists know about learning. He suggested academic qualifications were no guarantee of teaching ability. I pointed out that they normally suggest at least some ability to identify bullshit.

Later I met up with a friend who is training to be an accountant and had just been to a training course alongside a number of people who were (or were training to be) “consultants”. He told me that even in business they are expected to start their training with nonsense about learning styles and groupwork. When he looked up some of the ideas he’d encountered online he had noticed that even Wikipedia is wising up to this nonsense. “Learning styles” and the “Belbin Team Inventory” can easily be found to have been widely criticised by those who have researched them. Could it be that school managers might now have no excuse for not simply accepting such fads uncritically?

My friend also told me that a lot of the consultants he met were engaged in work in Further Education. A quick search for “further education consultants uk” on Google reveals that this is indeed a growth industry. Perhaps it’s just me, but when any part of the public sector is spending a fortune on consultants to tell them what to I start to worry that something is going wrong. Perhaps, people who read this who work in FE can reassure me?

Finally, I met up with an old school friend.

He said:

“Stop talking about your work all the time”.

Fair comment really.

Selling Out

I have decided to get out of the Metropolitan School, but I’ve been burnt enough times to know better than to rush.

I looked for a school where I could get a promotion and where the results were good. I didn’t have to wait long. My “email alerts” informed me of a suitable vacancy in a Catholic school in a rather affluent suburban town. The journey was quite lengthy, but no worse than it is to get to the Metropolitan School. The school’s A*-C level was over ninety percent, the area was leafy and privileged and the number of students with SEN was very low.

I spent the next few weeks getting everything sorted. I sought out my headteacher (that took over a week), my priest, and an old friend from Stafford Grove School to agree to give me references. I got the application form and filled it out and was happy to be invited to interview. I was somewhat taken aback to be told by my current headteacher that he’d received a request for references only on the afternoon of the day before the interview, which didn’t indicate a great deal of planning in the interview process. Similarly, when I phoned for more details about the lesson they wanted me to teach as part of the interview I couldn’t get hold of anybody, and couldn’t find out if I’d have access to a projector or interactive whiteboard.

When I arrived I discovered that there were three of us being interviewed. We each had a half hour lesson to teach, a tour of the school and interviews scheduled for the rest of the morning, with mine being planned for just before lunch. Inevitably, I found myself comparing everything with my current school.

The first culture shock was having to teach a year 7 class. They seemed genuinely enthusiastic to have their regular lesson interrupted. None of them asked for a pen, all of them listened to what I said. The biggest shock was when I asked for a volunteer to hand out worksheets and every single hand in the room went up. It was like having a class where every single child was Rod or Todd Flanders. There was one late arrival, Owen, who seemed unwilling to work, and he was on report and clearly being closely monitored.

Afterwards, the assistant head who had observed my lesson gave me feedback. She raved about the lesson, which due to the lack of foreknowledge had mainly consisted of direct questioning and writing on an ordinary whiteboard, i.e. the sort of thing I could have done off the top of my head without preparation. She told me that the lesson was at the very least “good” by OFSTED standards. She praised my behaviour management (apparently I’d done well to spot Owen), use of formative assessment, and relationship with the kids. I was delighted, I am used to having lessons like that criticised at the Metropolitan School. It made it sink in just how much teachers are judged on the attitude of the children, not the quality of the teaching.

The tour of the school was, as you’d expect, a succession of buildings which didn’t really reveal anything, although the children did seem extraordinarily well-behaved. What was very odd about it was that no opportunity was taken to introduce us to the other members of the department.

Then I waited while the other candidates were interviewed, I had the misfortune to be last and had to wait over an hour. Then the assistant head came in and said the head had been held up and asked if I could wait until after lunch. I had no choice but to agree. After lunch the other candidates went for a walk round while I waited for another hour. Finally I was called in. The interview was long, and strange. They had no interest in asking about my use of technology, but were quite happy to ask completely random questions like “What is the definition of Education?” and “So, do you agree that extra-curricular activities are a waste of time?” They reacted to every answer with so much agreement and smiling that it became absolutely impossible to judge whether I’d given a good answer or not.

After the interview I sat with the other candidates and chatted. Apparently we’d all been asked completely different questions which seemed rather odd. We were all equally bemused by the choice of questions and the reactions. None of us had been asked the usual question of “Are you a firm candidate?”

After an hour’s waiting, a teacher from the department we’d applied to came in and chatted. He explained that almost everyone in the department was an NQT. It seemed more than a little odd that nobody had mentioned this.

After another hour’s waiting and we were getting a bit fed up. One of the candidates went to find out if she could go home but failed to get an answer. Finally, we were called to the heads office and told “we don’t want to appoint until we’ve checked some more references. We’ll call tomorrow.”

Two days later the Head phoned to say that all the references had been checked out and were fine but they had been unable to agree who to appoint so had decided not to appoint anybody. By this point it wasn’t even a disappointment. I asked for feedback on the interview and was told only positive things which told me nothing at all.

I don’t know much about posh schools. I’m forming a tentative theory that they are run by people who couldn’t run up the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.