A Maths Teacher writes…

This comment appeared below the line on my reblog of Joe Kirby’s review of Daisy Christodoulou’s book “Seven Myths about Education”. It refers to that book and the analogy of educational methods as a “cargo cult”. I liked it so much I thought it worth giving you a chance to see it above the line.

This looks like a very interesting book and one which I’m sure will confirm all my prejudices concerning the pedagogical model now being pushed by OFSTED. I’ve been teaching for over twenty years, and have encountered some fairly incoherent and damaging ideas from ‘experts’, yet it’s only over the last couple of years that I find myself literally stunned by some of the words coming from the mouths of inspectors and ‘consultants’; to the point where in the last week alone I’ve had to ask them three times to repeat what they’ve said just to make sure I heard them properly. I simply can’t accept that rational human beings can believe in a non-conflicted manner that good teacher explanation hinders learning and progress if it strays past ‘the 5 minute limit’, which was a phrase that was thrown at me six times while being given feedback.

I’d been observed introducing vectors to a year 10 class of relatively able students. It’s not an easy school by any objective measure. I was given a 3. Apparently it would have been a 2 with outstanding elements except that my introduction, all told, with modelling, questioning and mopping up a couple of misconceptions lasted 8 minutes and 34 seconds! (Seriously) This means I require improvement. Short of recording my introduction and playing it back at double speed, I fail to see what I do. The consultant, who was Maths specialist, told me how he’d have done it. His explanation lasted 25 minutes. In fact, he eventually conceded that he couldn’t actually have done it himself any faster, so suggested maybe I should have broken it up over two lessons, despite having commented that all the class had grasped the concepts and made good progress. When I pointed out that his idea would halve the rate of progress he sort of smiled apologetically and gave a little shrug.

This man was not unintelligent. I think the shrug was a tacit acknowledgement that he was giving me inconsistent and contradictory advice. It was by way of an apology, but, in the name of consistency, he had to come out with this bullshit. He’s helping implement our new teaching and learning strategy.

Now, other than the fact that all this stands in direct opposition to everything Wilshaw has said about no fixed teaching models and the acceptability of a didactic approach, it is the sheer lunacy that sticks in my craw. I could not believe what I was hearing. I nearly grabbed him and shook him just to see if he was actually real and that I was not temporarily delusional. It’s just not acceptable that I should be forced to suffer such blatant assaults to my intelligence. Wilshaw makes all the right noises, but he seems to be spending too much time composing sound bites and none at all in ensuring his message is reaching the ‘frontline’.

The book looks great, but I can’t see its message ever getting through. OFSTED is now precisely the problem in education. I’m not entirely sure the cargo cult analogy is apt. Certainly, it’s a cult now; a cult whose dogma and ideology is far from fixed. It shifts according to whims of fashion and the subjective interpretation of the local priesthood. But it seems that even when its catechisms demand the impossible, the self-defeating or the contradictory, it’s very much a case of extra Ecclesiam nulla sulus.

A Primary School Mutiny

This guest post has been written by a reader of this blog. If you have anything you think other readers would be interested to hear about, just send me an email.

In March, during my first year of teaching, a group of teachers met in a room above a pub. What was discussed changed the education of hundreds of children for the better. This is the story of how a headteacher was removed who thought they were untouchable.

A bit about me: I came into teaching late and obtained my Primary PGCE aged 32. Prior to this I had worked in academia, gaining my masters and PhD during my time at university. I had tried hard to get a job during my final year, but found the doors closed to men my age. I got the impression that the (mainly) women in charge did not want a man working for them who had all these academic qualifications (despite the fact that in my day to day teaching they are practically worthless). So I started working as a supply teacher and got a number of assignments which helped my teaching skills progress. It was a great experience and being a supply teacher is probably the best thing you can do at the start of your career, you learn so much. After a while I got a regular posting 4 days a week at a tough school working with Year 6. Through this job I got to know someone who knew someone else and I went to a interview for a job where I was the only candidate and got the post. Yes it was through nepotism, but having applied for circa 65 jobs and getting only 5 interviews, who was I to care?

I started teaching at this primary school one September. From the start it was clear the school was full of staff who had lost the will to teach. The main reason for this was the headteacher. It took me two months to work them out, and when I did it was a massive shock for me. Prior to being a teacher you assume that those in charge of schools are professional, upstanding members of society. You think that schools are tightly controlled by the government (through the local council) and that bad practice and incompetence could not happen. How wrong can you be? After two months I had worked out that the reason the headteacher bullied everyone and threw their weight around was because they didn’t have the first idea what they were doing. In my first two months I had been shouted at in front of my class, made to feel like an idiot for daring to ask them a question and told I was unsatisfactory. The probable source of the issue was my complaining to them that I wasn’t getting my NQT time; only getting an hour and a half each week instead of three and a half. This bullying culminated in the head shouting in my face in front of parents and staff during a whole school assembly. I felt totally demoralised.

A week after this event I was pulling off the motorway on my trip to work and noticed there had been a crash on the roundabout it fed on to. As I got closer I noticed that the car involved looked suspiciously like the one my head drove. My heart jumped and I literally said out loud: “please be the head!” I glanced at the number plate and saw that it was indeed their car. I punched the air and hoped they were seriously injured.

What had I become? Here was a man who had two children and a third child on the way, and I was hoping that someone else was seriously injured? I was disgusted with myself and decided that rather than get more and more bitter, I would do what I could to make sure this person was no longer allowed to continue their behaviour. If you are interested, the head had one day off with whiplash, came back to school and insisted they could have died.

Just for a bit of background; prior to that March meeting I had witnessed the head doing the following since starting my post:

• Screaming in the face of an Afghan child who had started school at the start of term and who had spoken no English prior to doing so: “8 weeks, you’ve been here 8 weeks! You should have learned English by now.”
• Walking into my classroom and shouting at a child and reducing him to tears for no reason than he looked at the window when they were walking by.
• Telling the staff that if they wanted more money for books they should “go and stand on ******* **** road.” (a local red light area)
• Implementing changes to planning without guidance and shouting at those who did not understand
• Shouting at staff that they could not keep food in the staffroom because “it is not your home.”
• Calling the Year 6 cohort “thick” in conversation with a supply teacher
• Bawling at the teaching staff about (impending) OFSTED visit and saying they were unsatisfactory (when opposite was the case)
• Regularly emailing staff in the early hours then reprimanding them if they hadn’t read their email by the time they had got to work
• Having regular days off to work from home
• Leaving school to go and do the following: have car serviced, have a haircut, go shopping
• Copying an advert for recruiting new staff from a local school, despite having the morning off to come up with one. Added to the advert were the following attachments: one about dinner money, a out of date staff list and a letter littered with grammatical mistakes

Other staff did not know what to do and, in conversation over a few weeks, it was decided to contact our union and get a meeting called. This took a long time for people to pluck up the courage to attend due to fear of losing their job. The catalyst for most staff was the fact that many of us had gone to doctors and been prescribed anti-depressants to stop panic attacks and some had gone off sick due to stress. I include myself on that list. As we poured out the litany of misdemeanours of the head to our union rep his eyebrows continued to rise. By the end of the meeting they must have been on the ceiling. We collectively breathed a sign of relief when the union rep told us something would happen soon.

It didn’t.

We decided to formalise our complaint into a proper grievance and lodged it with the council just before the Easter break. Co-incidentally I had been made to reapply for my post during the last two weeks of term and I was told I would not be appointed. So I was potentially unemployed with three children and a wife to support come the following September. It was the culmination of a long bullying process. At the same time one member of staff left to get another job and another handed his notice in, leaving the profession for good.

After submitting our grievance we expected immediate action from the authorities.

It didn’t come.

At the start of the summer term the head returned as normal. I was amazed. I was also appalled and decided to make the problem known more widely.

Here requires a bit of commentary. If you are experiencing the same thing at your school then I would recommend the following. Get the governors involved, get the local councillors involved and get parents involved. After the failure of the council to act I decided to email the local MP and councillors (helpfully both Labour) – detailing the complaint. I got an email back saying he would write to the head of Education asking why nothing had been done. On the back of this the council started to take the complaint seriously but they did not want to come and get any evidence from us. We had to write and complain to the investigator that we WANTED to give evidence, so they could do their job. Finally we were allowed to give our verbal evidence to the investigator face to face during the last week of summer half-term. During that evidence we made further allegations against the head, including racism, bullying of staff and children, dismissing people illegally, not having proper policies in place for anything and serious safeguarding issues. We expected something to happen over half-term. Nothing did. The council were attempting a cover-up. Luckily the chair of governors had been removed and a more pro-active one elected in their place. She wanted answers. We couldn’t provide them due to the nature of the complaint, as she may be called to arbitrate on the case.

More staff went on long-term sick. The head continued in post, oblivious to what was going on around them, but losing their grip on reality further. This dragged on until the last Monday of that term when they were finally suspended. An audit that week revealed serious financial mismanagement and a lack of basic provision for the children. The suspension only came after a further intervention from our MP and local councillors, as well as the chair of governors badgering the council for action.

I started in a new post in the September of the new academic year, but the saga dragged on further and was only ended before that Christmas when a newsletter went to parents saying the head had “retired.” Still we have had no formal response to our grievance, and no admission of culpability from anyone at the council, who had supposedly audited the school over the past few years. The head has been allowed to retire with a (probable) pay off and a (probable) large pension that all of us tax payers are paying. As far as I can make out, I have been the only one to have lost my job over their incompetence. The council subsequently approached the union and asked for the grievance to be dropped, on the basis that the head has retired. We rejected this as absolutely unacceptable. Why should the head get away with a large pay-off and a huge pension when they ran an otherwise successful school into the ground through incompetence? Clearly the council still did not understand our resolve in getting justice for the staff involved.

The moral of the story, I think, is this: If you are in a job where someone is abusing the power given to them it is your responsibility to act. Often, incompetence in post merely hides a mass of problems beneath the surface. Headteachers in the primary setting often think they are judge, jury and executioner. In a lot of cases they are right, as the system of governors running schools is wide open to abuse and nepotism. However, it is important to remember that everyone has a boss and, if you see incompetence affecting the education of children, it is your job to report it. If the governors do nothing go to the council. If the council do nothing go to the MPs. If the MPs do nothing go to the Secretary of State. If he does nothing give the story to the newspapers. If this doesn’t do anything leak to the parents. Eventually something will happen. We have come a long way in 10 months, but there is still work to be done. If you are in the same boat as we were, have the guts to make a stand. Good luck.

Parallel Universes at the London Festival of Education

I went to the London Festival of Education last weekend. Or at least I think I did.

You can never be quite sure because I seem to have spent most of the weekend confronting a different version of reality, one way or another, to a lot of other people.

So for instance, I thought the question and answer session with Michael Gove was, apart from a few responses to questions from the audience, largely uncontentious. I know I’m likely to react favourably to hearing the secretary of state for education arguing for high academic standards for all and referencing the work of Dan Willingham, but I seem to have missed the triggers for some of the hostile audience reaction. I could have sworn the audience booed after he said that not everybody had high ambitions for children and that not all schools were good enough. I could have sworn the audience erupted when he said that you couldn’t have education without assessment, before he made a more controversial claim about the type of assessment he meant. But perhaps I have imagined this as it seems unthinkable that anybody could disagree with these claims.

I suppose some of this could be explained by political extremists in the audience. There were a few bearded types handing out leaflets and chanting slogans on the way in (and some kind of effigy was being waved about at one point), however, it doesn’t explain what happened in the behaviour discussion. Tom Bennett was there, and was reasonable and charming in circumstances where less even-tempered men might have turned to violence, but his two fellow panellists were apparently not of this earth. One, Paul Dix, had apparently arrived from a world where schools were constantly inflicting punishment. In his world that seemed to be almost all they did, and to hear him tell it, the criminal justice system on Planet Dix was also great at punishing young offenders. What’s more, in his world, the punishment apparently never works. A far cry from this dimension’s version of England, where kids regularly go unpunished after even the most appalling behaviour in school and, if there’s anything which conspicuously doesn’t work, it’s letting them get away with it. Of course it’s not unusual for behaviour consultants to decry punishment – after all they make their money by telling incompetent SMT that behaviour problems are down to teachers rather than children or managers – but normally it seems to hinge on the definition of punishment. Normally having said they are against “punishment” they then say they are in favour of “sanctions” or “consequences” and advocate something that sounds pretty much like punishment anyway. Not this time. I listened carefully for the usual equivocation and incoherence. I waited for the inevitable nonsense phrase like “I don’t believe in punitive punishment” that indicates that it was all down to a confusion about the meaning of words. It never came. He really was suggesting that behaviour be dealt with exclusively by praise, rewards, thinking nice thoughts and having “a quiet word”. He made his universe sound like a lovely place; one where there simply was no need for anyone to stand up to injustice or protect the innocent from the guilty. A world so different from our own that it is scarcely imaginable. But even that was normal compared with the home planet of the other speaker.

I had heard of Sue Hallam, an education lecturer, for the first time a day or so earlier. Another academic had suggested to me that she would be a good source of evidence that mixed ability teaching benefited the least able. The other sources of evidence suggested by that academic had all failed to indicate any such thing, so I was not predisposed to assume that Sue Hallam was the source of inaccurate information about our world. This was something that became apparent only as she spoke. Again we were told that punishment did not work, and again no indication was given that this wasn’t meant literally. But a more striking contrast between the Hallamverse and reality were apparent in her other claims. In her realm, school uniform causes truancy. As somebody who has repeatedly seen the effect of non-uniform day on attendance at schools in our universe, this seemed remarkably implausible. Also, research showed that a horseshoe shaped seating arrangement was most effective in her universe: something that has escaped all the researchers I have read in our world. Finally, and most strange of all – in fact this is so strange that, if Tom Bennett hadn’t confirmed it in his own blog, I would have put it down to some kind of hallucination – she revealed the drastically different mores of her world by suggesting female teachers could control badly behaved boys by flirting with them. She did explain that the same tactics would be unacceptable from male teachers, but seemed utterly oblivious to the extent to which this particular advice would not be welcomed by teachers on our planet.

My last event of the festival, one which was so crowded that I only just got a seat, was a discussion with Michael Wilshaw and Brian Lightman. I was a bit surprised to hear Brian Lightman saying nothing I disagreed with; he was after all one of the key figures in the GCSE English regrading lobby. He was sensible and constructive about the effects of overly prescriptive inspection on teaching, but this alone was not grounds for thinking I was still in a different universe. Michael Wilshaw was even less of a surprise. His message, which seemed to surprise some of the audience, was consistent with what he’d said here, i.e. OFSTED will not require a particular teaching style. Didactic teaching is fine as long as kids learn. He even said that boring lessons on quadratic equations were fine (maths teachers everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief). Some of the audience were not expecting this. They were apparently expecting him to complain about how teachers were terrible. However, this did not mean they were from a parallel universe. They had simply read the press coverage he usually gets, where papers from both left and right select individual out-of-context quotations and use them to suggest he is at war with teachers and does nothing but complain about them in speeches. He even explained some of those remarks, pointing out he didn’t seriously expect heads to model themselves on Clint Eastwood and hadn’t claimed that teaching was stress-free only that headteachers had such a rewarding job that, when they fail, they should not be allowed to blame their poor performance on stress. The consensus was clear on Twitter and in the hall. He was talking sense. He did seem like a reasonable human being. We’d all be happy to be inspected by him. We’d rather have heard more of him and less of Brian Lightman (a bit harsh actually, but never mind). The worst criticism I saw of his performance on Twitter was that he’d “played the audience”, which, as criticism, seems to amount to a complaint that he hadn’t managed to live up to his own demonisation.

Happily I was now in the same universe as everybody else. There was only one version of the Wilshaw event and it was the one where the head inquisitor of OFSTED was charming and generally demonstrated to be a good egg. No parallel version of events existed. We were all on the same plane of reality. This episode of the Twilight Zone was over.

Or at least that’s what I thought as I left the hall. On the way home, I was sent a link to the Telegraph account of the talk:

Ofsted head Sir Michael Wilshaw tells head teachers to “stop moaning”

Head teachers should stop “moaning” and get on with the job, the chief inspector of schools has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, said that being a head teacher was a brilliant, well paid job and that school leaders had no grounds to complain. His comments, at the London Festival of Education, come ten days before Ofsted’s annual report, published on Nov 27, which will focus heavily on the quality of leadership in England’s primary and secondary schools. The comments risk further infuriating the teaching profession which has recently been told by Sir Michael that there is no stress in teaching and that staff who are out the school gates at 3.30pm should be paid less….

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.