I first joined the NUT (National Union Of Teachers) back in 2001 as a PGCE student. It is now part of the NEU (National Education Union). This year, I finally resigned my membership.
I think being in a trade union is really important. I have been helped by my union in the past when I’ve needed it. I know there are still many great union reps in the NEU standing up for teachers. But a trade union has to represent all its members, not just those of a particular ideology. I think the NEU has become an ideological basket case, unable to show any respect to teachers who don’t believe in progressive education.
Here is why the NEU don’t speak for me.
Mary Bousted is one of the joint general-secretaries of the NEU. She might oppose times table tests, but as a secondary math teacher, I see how many kids arrive at secondary schools without any fluency in number bonds or times tables.
Kevin Courtney, the other joint general secretary, agreeing with this:
The managing director of the CBI says he’s worried about the emphasis in England’s school system on rote learning techniques.
Neil Carberry is only half joking when he invokes one of Charles Dicken’s least loveable characters, Thomas Gradgrind, the hard-hearted, fact-obsessed school superintendant in Hard Times.
“We want human beings who do human things really well because, the way technology is changing, that’s where the jobs will be in years to come.”
Speaking at the launch of a new education strategy for the BBC, he said simply focusing on getting teenagers to the age of 16 with a clutch of GCSEs was not enough.
“We need a whole education approach to young people including the ability to work in teams, to be resilient, and to present well.”
He’s concerned there is more emphasis now on memorising facts, than in school systems in other advanced economies.
“Facts matter in education, times tables matter. Basic maths and literacy are the gateways to good careers. But we can teach them in more engaging ways which develop other skills.”
Rather than what Neil Carberry describes as “‘Gradgrindish’ repeating of times tables in the classroom”, he says knowledge should be used in a context that makes it relevant.
What children learn in England has been re-centred around a curriculum with an emphasis on knowledge in core academic subjects.
We’ve had decades of dumbed down education. It’s great that now kids are expected to actually know stuff. We don’t need our union trying to turn the clock back.
Behaviour remains one of the biggest scandals in our schools, and something that creates toxic working conditions in schools. Knowing how much happier teachers are when they don’t have to fight behaviour, I’d expect a teachers’ union to support strong discipline. Yet, this is what we here from NEU conference (via TES).
Zero tolerance discipline policies in schools are “an abuse of the rights of our children”, a teachers’ union has heard.
The claim came as the NUT section of the National Education Union debated pupils’ mental health.
There was unanimous support from the conference in Brighton for the union opposing “the move towards ever more punitive behaviour policies in schools” which it said was “feeding a mental health crisis for our children”.
“The increasing use of detention, isolation and exclusion, often talked of as being ‘zero tolerance’ approaches, usually mean ignoring the varied difficulties children have in favour of punishment,” the motion read.
“We believe that above all else, children need support, respect and love.”
Michael Holland, from Lambeth, told delegates: “Zero tolerance is intolerance. Zero tolerance doesn’t work. Zero tolerance is cruel, Victorian, Dickensian.
“It punishes working class children the most, it punishes black children, and children from black and ethnic minority groups are far more likely to be excluded from schools.
“It’s an abuse of the rights of our children.”
Because, of course, letting children run riot is so good for their mental health.
Then there’s political extremism. Skwawkbox is a hard left “fake news” website, known for its defence of anti-semitism. Here’s the NEU in my region sharing its unhinged conspiracy theories about the BBC.
More from Mary Bousted. This time arguing against knowledge on the infamously silly grounds that kids will be doing “jobs that haven’t been created yet”.
I wrote that if we are to prepare our children and young people for the world they will live and work in, then we must ditch the false divide between knowledge and skills. We must acknowledge that we need both.
And I noted that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is strongly advocating curricula that integrate knowledge, across subject disciplines, with skills development.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of education at the OECD, looks ahead to the abilities that will increasingly be needed by our school leavers in the future. He argues that the demands on learners and on education systems are evolving quickly.
Schleicher says that, in the past, education was primarily about teaching people something. But now, he says, education should be “about making sure that students develop a reliable compass and the navigations skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world”.
Schleicher reminds us that, in the past, teachers could expect that what they taught would equip students with the skills needed for the rest of their lives. But that is not the case today because, he argues, “schools need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented and to solve social problems that we do not yet know will arise”.
Here she is again attacking teachers for off-rolling. While I have grave doubts that off-rolling is anything to do with Ebacc scores, I accept it is a problem and that headteachers who do this should be criticised. But since when was it the job of a teaching union to denounce teachers?
Similarly, when a school disputed a draft OFSTED report for being too critical, you’d expect a teachers’ union to be on the school’s side. But, no. If your school is in the wrong MAT, the NEU will not stand up for you.
Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, has demanded an investigation into the involvement of the RSC’s office into the inspection because it “raises serious concerns that Ofsted is not completely independent.”
His words were echoed by Mary Bousted, his co-leader, who said the outcome of an Ofsted inspection should not be dependent on “how confident or savvy the leaders are in challenging the judgment”.
Yes. That’s a teaching union publicly objecting to school leaders who have confidence when their schools are criticised and do something about it.
Here’s an NEU executive member attacking OFSTED for saying they will support heads who punish bad behaviour.
This is Kevin Courtney saying that it is “disgraceful child abuse” to let parents know how kids did in a test.
More support for dumbing down (along with personal attacks) from Mary Bousted:
Ofsted is in “a lot of trouble” and its chief inspector Amanda Spielman is “not a safe pair of hands,” a teaching union leader has claimed.
The criticism from Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) has been sparked by Ms Spielman’s warning that disadvantaged teenagers are not being challenged enough with the reading materials they were given.
Dr Bousted, a former English teacher, said the chief inspector of schools had showed “a complete lack of understanding of the challenging nature of work in disadvantaged schools”.
She said: “Teachers in these schools have been trying to get children to understand that reading can be enjoyable, and to give them books which are appropriate to their reading age, and which allow them to get enjoyment by reading fluently, and not constantly having to decipher words they don’t understand or having to work their way through complex sentence structures.”
More from Kevin Courtney this time the problem is assessment.
The effects of our assessment system on learning, workload and wellbeing are at the heart of England’s educational problems.
Those who work in education know this in their bones. It is a message that education unions have tried to communicate for many years. They have been too often met with incomprehension or hostility. Politicians have clung to the notion that only high-stakes testing, and punitive accountability, could lift educational standards. The reality, that testing and accountability of these kinds are the route towards low-quality education, was not something they could bear to contemplate.
Here’s a branch of the NEU not far from me, sharing media attacks on a school for asking kids to be quiet when moving between lessons. Teachers at the school have been generally supportive of the policy and distressed by the media attacks. But why would a teachers’ union care about them?
And finally, the worst insult to me personally, and the best indicator of the contempt the NEU’s leaders have for teachers, Mary Bousted supported a troll’s blogpost that, amongst other conspiracy theories, linked me with the far right. (Full story here.) Obviously this was all all lies and when I challenged about why she would spread malicious lies about one of her own members she said this:
I have 17 years of membership of the NEU. During one strike called by the NUT, I was at a school where out of dozens of NUT members, I was one of only 2 who didn’t scab. Even the union rep wouldn’t strike. And this is the thanks I get: begrudging acknowledgement from the general secretary that she won’t disagree with me when I say I’m not a Nazi?
Thanks, but no thanks, NEU/NUT. You no longer deserve the support of teachers. I’ve joined NASUWT.
Noise
February 9, 2019Children are noisy. This is something people often don’t appreciate if they don’t work in schools, as can be seen by the recurring experiments with “open plan classrooms” that seem to happen every few years. Before I became a teacher, if I walked past a school at break or lunchtime, I was shocked by the sheer volume emitted by even very young kids playing. As a secondary teacher, I have noticed how kids are sometimes so noisy at break and lunch times, particularly if it’s windy, that even the politest kids might come into the classroom unintentionally shouting because that is the volume they’ve been talking at during their break.
Year 7 student: “HELLO, SIR!”
Me, standing back and covering my ears: “Hello. Why are you shouting?”
Year 7 student, now at the volume of a light aircraft taking off: “I’M NOT SHOUTING!”
Me, ears ringing: Okay, Caitlyn, just go to your seat and don’t talk, thank you. Dear Lord, please, don’t talk.
Another Year 7 student arriving: “HELLO, SIR. I DID THE HOMEWORK!”
Me, now standing at the doorway. looking pained: “Hello, Martin. Okay, year 7, just come in silently. Just go to your seat absolutely silently. No need to say hello, just go to your seat without talking. WITHOUT TALKING! ABSOLUTE SILENCE, YEAR 7! Thank you.”
Left to their own devices kids get loud, perhaps without realising it. Younger secondary students often just enjoy expending the energy involved in a loud conversation. Older secondary students are often asserting their position in the dominance hierarchy by talking over each other in ever louder voices. Once kids are talking in the classroom, the usual trajectory is for the noise to get louder, unless interrupted, and while sometimes a piece of work that requires an unexpected amount of concentration will cause a class to spontaneously become quieter, that is the memorable exception and not the rule for most classes. In fact, often a class getting quieter without being asked is so exceptional that it is immediately followed by one student shouting “WHY HAS IT GONE QUIET?”
One year, not very long ago, around autumn half term, I had a bit of an epiphany. Other than sixth form teaching, my main class was a very large bottom set in year 7 with a huge range of ability. As year 7 classes often do, they had begun the year barely speaking in lessons. I didn’t worry about that; this can often be a good time to enforce the expectation that you learn by listening to the teacher, not staring out of the window and then asking the person next to you what the teacher has just said. As the weeks went on, they had became more comfortable and were able to talk sensibly about the work. Then, as it got towards half term, their talking (for a small but significant minority of students) was becoming less about the work and more about winding each other up, and putting each off. Lesson starts were also becoming far slower as they stopped on the way in to chat, with some students having to be reminded that behaviour like going to your seat and getting out a pen should be immediate, and not left until the last possible moment. My epiphany consisted of the realisation that they had been easier to manage, and apparently learning more, when they were in silence; because of the size of the class, it really wasn’t practical to monitor which conversations were “learning conversations” and which weren’t. Besides, most weren’t yet capable of the sort of conversation that would aid learning, and they weren’t likely to learn to have that sort of conversation, unless it was modeled by hearing conversations about the work between students and the teacher shared with the entire class.
For all my classes, I began starting every lesson by sending students to sit down in silence and begin work. I then decided, for every piece of work I set, whether it was worth letting students talk. I quickly realised that, when teaching mainly a mix of weaker key stage 3 classes and sixth form, that the sixth formers needed to be able to discuss the work almost all the time (although this was a small class where I could monitor the conversation), and the key stage 3 students didn’t really need to talk to each other at all. I don’t want to make this a universal statement about all key stage 3 classes, or all subjects. Where motivation is good and work requires a lot of thought, but not much writing, there’s every reason to allow students to talk. When you know students have the judgement to give each other useful help and the maturity not to go off topic, learning conversations are the order of the day. Obviously, there are things to be learnt, or practised in some subjects that positively require talking. However, I genuinely think we make a mistake when we assume that talking is normal in class and silence the exception, rather than the other way around. If teachers were to ask themselves, “Would students benefit, or be distracted by talk during this activity?” and didn’t have to worry about whether they would actually be able to enforce silence, I think lessons in most schools would be a lot quieter. In fact, I think that we are often acclimatised to completely unnecessary and counter-productive levels of noise in schools, and don’t realise that it could be different, or that in some schools it is different.
Research seems to favour quiet classrooms (see here) particularly for younger children. Even a quick search with Google Scholar will find a lot of individual studies showing the negative effects of classroom noise on different types of students. However, we can tolerate more distractions if work is difficult, so the argument for silence is stronger on more routine tasks, but before we assume that “learning conversations” make for the best environment for problem-solving, there is some evidence that problem solving is not best done collaboratively.
I think those with an ideological commitment to making learning more like play, may positively favour noise. I do recall during the debates on “silent corridors” in schools, some progressives believed that even the conversations kids have walking down the corridor between lessons were valuable learning opportunities. Others also believed that silence was actively damaging to children. Common sense (and also perhaps the research on noise and health) tells us that silence for the duration of a single lesson, or for part of a lesson, or for short walks between lessons, is not only not harmful, but probably far healthier than the other extreme of a screaming racket. There are those who see children as terribly vulnerable to the normal stresses of schooling, or to the raised voice of an adult, but somehow immune to the stress involved in 6 hours of constant noise, with even friendly conversations having to involve yelling in each other’s faces.
Schools are noisy. That is not likely to change. But I think there are clear benefits to having schools where the default for classrooms is silence. It is one of those areas where consistency is important. Any classroom where it is okay to shout out whenever you like is likely to lower expectations elsewhere in the school. The existence of any classroom where the teacher feels powerless to prevent teenagers from continuing their social lives throughout the lesson, is likely to make it harder for other teachers. I suspect most schools would benefit from turning the noise down, and making a real effort to ensure that silence is the default learning behaviour.
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