SCHOOLS OPEN, TEACHERS SACRIFICED, BORIS OK

Let’s get straight to it: If we reopen our schools some teachers will catch the covid-19 virus and some will die.

We know that Boris cares for state education. I remember he mentioned it on the eve of the General Election. He also said something about increasing funding. Schools have now been told that they will have to fund any government awarded teacher pay rise  out of existing budgets. Cuts, therefore continue.

We know he cares about teachers because he read out a list on Sunday where we were placed in the appropriate alphabetical order.

Scientists of different varieties say:

• Children do or don’t get the covid-19 virus.

• Kids don’t die much from the virus.

• Students may or may not transmit the virus less or more than adults.

But the government has a road map.

Some schools are to re-open from June 1^st. The least sensible option would be to call in those children who can’t socially isolate, like to play with soft things and occasionally need a plaster. The least vital returnees would be those who can’t now do the inessential post SATs work. Oh dear, the road map signals Reception, Year1 and Year 6 to start first. Their unions don’t agree. Do you think primary teachers would have prioritised these children?

Do you think they were asked?

When it comes to opening schools, whilst the virus rules and there’s no vaccine, it’s just a suicide mission for some of us; maybe just a few, dozens, hundreds.

I want no-one to worry about this: if you fear for your own or your family’s health I am not in the business of signing death warrants, or attending any more children’s or teachers’ funerals. Be aware of your family’s health, yes, be alert to the possibilities and stay home to stay safe.

Let’s not worry about the radio phone-in whingers who say “You’re being paid; go to work. When I was a boy…”

Let’s smile sweetly at those who say we’ve been on a long holiday these last 8 weeks. I’ve seen the amount of work set, phone-calls, emails, video/google/zoom lessons and meetings. I’ve seen all the data that shows how each student is working in every subject and yes, I know, a third of them (in my school)  haven’t been doing much if anything. I’ve seen the predicted grades \ rank order deliberations and rewrites and I’ve heard the disappointment from teachers who have worked really well with Year 11s and this was going to be a record breaking year. No teacher wants to work from home – we’ve always been in it for the kids and this home schooling lark is dull for teachers, too.

Many of the younger staff live in flats without balconies or communal gardens. They, too, are stir-crazy and have been clamouring to be put on our care of key workers rota so they can come to school. Many are struggling with reticent children of their own and trying to get them off one tablet and on to a laptop, once they have finished setting on line lessons themselves. Their children, I hope, are not amongst the 170,000 children classed as homeless in the UK.

We’ve delivered goggles and gloves to a hospital and I’ve been released to drive thousands of masks to care homes, special schools, paramedics, hospice and surgeries in and around Ware. A 4^th teacher joined the 3 who have spent weeks making these masks, another has been making surgical gowns. Parents and friends donated almost £3,000 so that we can make up for some of the deficiencies in a NHS condemned by 10 years of cuts by Boris and his mates.

When this virus passes, fades or ends let’s make sure no government ever abandons the NHS, its workers, or our health without us doing a little more than clapping.

Our staff are desperate to get back to working with children. As a preliminary, do I get staff and parents to sign a waiver in case they get seriously ill?

As an employer of around 130 people I have a duty of care to each of them and I cannot deliberately put them at risk. Some politicians and the DfE say we don’t need PPE and we must not wear surgical masks because that will reduce the supply to the NHS. These giants may offer some Turkish gear, cheap. However 8% of teachers in a recent TES survey agreed that they do not need PPE, the other 92% were wrong of course.

I don’t expect to see anyone with asthma, diabetes or epilepsy in school. I will not be chasing, admonishing or failing kids and staff who are frightened to come to school – or should I force them? You see, schools are recognised as hubs for the transmission of diseases in normal times and I doubt this virus will back off knowing this return to school is an attempt at herd immunity by stealth.

Because we really want to teach, see our shared role in saving the economy and teaching the kids who will have to mop up this disaster for years, this is how my school could start when we welcome any secondary school students in a pandemic, and that might not be for months yet:

• The current year 10 only will be taught Monday - Thursday only. We will do lots of cleaning on Fridays as well as having site staff cleaning anything that doesn’t move, all day long, every day.

• Half of the year group will come in from 9.00am - 12.00pm. The other half will do 12.30pm - 3.30pm (No calling for your mates, getting on a bus, walking with anyone, giving friends a lift).

• Kids will line up 2 metres apart in the playground.

• Groups of 12 maximum will be escorted to a room where they will stay.

• Instead of hour long lessons we will “teach” 40 minute classes.

• Classes will have subject specialists but probably not the teacher who has taught this group since September.

• I will be on corridors wearing one of our visors and I will bark at children getting close.

• In those rooms kids will be seated 2 metres apart.

• The teacher, in a visor or own mask, will not get closer than 2 metres to a student.

• There will be no handing out of books or equipment after initial distribution. 

• The teacher will not be able to look at your work, do any marking as you write, nor will they collect in work.

• Kids will be escorted out of the building for breaks where they will stay 2 metres apart or receive a piercing blast on a deputy head’s disposable whistle.

• There will be no drama lessons and no PE involving changing rooms.

• At 12.00pm students will be able, by prior appointment, to enter the canteen (two metres apart) and take a previously purchased (by Wisepay not cash or cheque) packed lunch from a long table. Then leave the building and go home.

• The 12.30pm attendees will start in the playground and be escorted……

• Teachers and Teaching Assistants will work according to a rota; admin as required and cleaners a lot more. We will be cleaning surfaces all day, if we have enough disinfectant now that Mr Trump has reduced availability.

We have written a timetable for this scenario. Staff with existing conditions, pregnancy, illness,  screened or sick relatives at home cannot be called upon. I’m 67 and fat and the doctor says I have asthma – do I go in?

So lots of cover work. Those kids who benefit from closer help, a bit of live marking or even a pat on the back will have to get used to formality.

The teachers will go home and set work for the other 800 kids on line.

That’s week one for Year 10. What do we do in week two?

There’s no way these students can be judged by exams alone, is there?

So Year 7, 8 and 9 keep doing the work at home. Year 6: We have a plan to help you visit us in small groups before September. You can’t come until the shops open to sell you a school uniform.

We want to teach, to care and nurture our young people, to help them see how important and valuable each of them is and how every last one of them has a part to play in creating a fairer society and world. Politicians should listen to us.

Dennis O'Sullivan (Headteacher)

Don’t Fear The Reaper; Send Your Kids To Private Schools

11th December 2013


Christmas is sadly a wicked time of fear, dread and despair for many. It’s not just for those with inbred hatred and distrust of their own families where reaching for a dinner knife puts everyone on edge, remembering that unfortunate slip when granddad and grandma were eternally parted. It’s not just for the 6.7 million working families who are living in poverty according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Shed not a piteous tear for them this Christmas. Nor for the West Country badger-cullers who failed to meet their government approved kill targets when the badgers, “moved the goalposts,” and, “went underground.”

Public sector workers with their 1% rise might weep when they see the predicted 6% rise in food prices next year alongside the 10% rip off electricity and gas prices increase. They may applaud the decision to award our members of parliament an 11% pay rise if only because it makes it even more clear that MPs are not in “public service.”

Our smug chancellor and his self-congratulatory cronies whooped and Oh yahed (pronounce it ‘yard’) in parliament last Thursday as Baron Osborne declared that he had managed to manipulate a house price boom to give the impression of economic growth whilst we have a massive burgeoning of food banks. To add to the gloom and shame our welfare state now has “social supermarkets” where those on benefits can buy discarded supermarket goods that would otherwise be landfill.

 Let’s not mourn the 24,000 pensioners who died of the cold during the mild winter of 2012 according to the National Office of Statistics. We can beat that record this winter.

 Please do spare many thoughts for those who made a conscious, rational decision to get rid of their kids for as long as possible by sending them to private boarding schools. Surely if you pay 30 grand a year (and the rest) you should expect year-round peace. But, no, the kids return for Christmas.

 Some clarification about private education in England: our private schools are called public schools even though entry is by payment; stranger still they are registered charities for tax purposes. Ex-Prime Minister, John Major finally noticed social inequality, "In every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class. To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking." The privately educated cabinet ministers chorused an “OK Yah” (that’s ‘yard’ without the‘d’) in delight. Mind you, the grey enigma Major is the only person ever to run away from a circus to become an accountant.

In this Land of Opportunity I admire the successes of our great private schools. They are truly independent. No left wing enemies of promise undermining their drive for standards. No nasty trade unions, no national pay agreement, none of that pesky qualified teachers only stuff. Headmasters can employ whoever they want to do whatever they say. I'd embrace the freedom to pay our staff less but the enemies of promise (wreckers, Trotskyists, vegans and Daily Mail readers) won't let me.

 Unlike our selective and increasingly backdoor selective state schools many private schools don't turn your kids away because they are weakish academically. Given the long history of public schools looking after the dim sons of the inbred inherited nobility many private schools can gratefully give them places, take your money, keep the kids quiet, educate them a bit and exclude them from their exam statistics. There are no league tables of private schools exam results. I know of a school which achieved 101% passes a few years ago. Yippee, let’s go private.

The state system is encouraged by the elfin Gove to lose Drama, Sport and Music whilst public schools love these subjects and anything else that keeps the kids occupied in the long evenings and weekends of boarding school idleness.

The clown Boris Johnson (Eton) says that we are born unequal. He claimed that his chums were born dead clever and the rest of us should know our place as we are not of his calibre. Most prime ministers and cabinet ministers went private much to the delight of the proud “mps” Gove (minor public school in posh talk) and I want our kids to aspire to run the country without needing the inherited wealth of most cabinet ministers – including Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg. Likewise the public spirited judges and barristers. I want our kids to aspire to such wonderful service to their communities.

Many BBC people went to private schools and it obviously helps you get a job there and our kids should be able to aspire to BBC respect, except of course for Savile, Hall and possibly all the other bearded, star-following wannabes from the 60s whose public school bosses knew how to turn a blind eye.

So let us all become private schools. There is no Ofsted inspector blindly belching data. The unNational Curriculum does not apply and we could do what we jolly well want. There are no league tables of GCSE and A level results. Public schools publish what they wish and this allows weaker students to avoid the humiliation of being publicly recorded as a failure and bringing into question the good name of their schools.

 I know where we can get the money, too. To live his dreamworld of inequality Mr Gove pays the new almost empty, unregulated University Technology Colleges twice per student what other state schools get. Around £10,000 per UTC student matches many minor public school day student fees. To make up for the Saturday school attendance – there to stop the boarders rioting but now imbedded to keep the kids away from parents. In return there are the lovely long holidays, which, you may recall was the start of this blog about 700 words ago...

Remember how rarely you got to go out when the kids were young, and babysitters were hard to find, and you couldn't stay out too late? Well send the little blighters to boarding school, and you can go out and forget about them, and have as much to drink as you want without having to explain yourself, wear clothes or keep the noise down. House parents in boarding schools are great babysitters - they don't necessarily have teaching qualifications but they are checked for dodgy pasts, I believe.

And whilst on this subject there is no evidence to suggest that children in boarding schools are any more likely to be sexually abused than if they have served as altar boys in the Catholic Church. No evidence at all, allegedly.

Mind you I went to a catholic grammar school for boys where my form tutor chose to put boys across his knee for a quick spank rather than use the established procedures for a documented beating with a bone shaped piece of leather. You bad, sanctimonious man, Joe Tora.

 And you know how stroppy teenagers can get? Well you don't need to bother about that, look on private school boarding as like being in care without the stigma. Give em enough cash and the school will keep your naughty kids locked up at night. I remember about 8 years ago when the biggest local drug bust was of a student locker in a well-known private school, more drugs than ever seen in a comp. Private schools go better with coke.

Actually the best reason to send your kids to private schools, even the low achieving hippy-rich mickey mouse institutions we have in the shires, is for every fee paying parents to say to their state educated peers: I am better than you. My money is a measure of my worth. I know very well a 14 year old girl who was doing brilliantly at state school. She had firm friends and was involved in all the extra-curricular activities on offer. Mummy wanted the status of private school, granddad paid for the school and the girl was never again to talk to her state school friends. Everything to climb the social ladder at age 11.

It’s not about exam success, either. PISA has a statistical tool for stripping away advantages brought by social advantage or funding levels, so that countries and sectors within countries can be compared fairly. When applied to private and state schools in the UK there is almost no difference in their performance. PISA claim private schools only appear more effective because they are better funded and because they have more advantaged students.

I know to my cost the enormity of the condescension showered on our comprehensive children by teacher-parents of private school kids, doing their social conscience bit with a deficit model of working class achievement that should have been permanently inserted in a manner that would never be forgotten. “Oh, look how well that child sat down today; let’s give him an award; I know children in my child’s private school who can’t sit down that nicely…”

 Returning at an angle to the notion of service the traitorous Cambridge 5 – Philby, Burgess, Mclean, Blunt and possibly John Cairncross were all educated at “good public schools” where they learned so much about service that they repeatedly betrayed their country. Oddly all were members of an elite secret Cambridge University society – the Angels. A bit like the Eton Boys at Oxford.

Cameron, Boris and Osborne were all members of the exclusive Bullingdon Club whose dining exploits perhaps suggest some potty training problems embedded by being away from home too long, too early.

 Andrew Gimson, biographer of the mad-even-then Boris Johnson, reported "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man.”

Oh yes, public school will teach you manners. As the short story write Saki said if you truly want a boy to be vicious you have to send him to a good public school. I went to Harrow, by the way, only to get kicked off their football pitches which, even on a Sunday, were not for the likes of me.


Dennis O'Sullivan

Secondary Heads Unite in Condemnation of Changes to Early Exam Entry that Disrupts School and Pupil Plans

Members of the country’s  school leadership unions, NAHT and ASCL, have today prepared a letter to parents on behalf of secondary heads expressing their concern and frustration with the government's lack of planning and direction for GCSEs.

The secondary heads say the latest announcement of changes to reporting mechanisms for early GCSE exam entries – just weeks before students were due to sit them – is the latest in a series of disruptive, unplanned changes rushed in by the Department for Education that have left schools and pupils in disarray.

The letter reads:

Dear Parents,

For the third time in the last two years, we have had to alter our plans for GCSEs because of a sudden announcement from the government. We know how important these exams are to you and we are frustrated we cannot focus all our energies on raising results.

Without any notice and with immediate effect, the government has limited schools' ability to enter students early for GCSEs - after we had already planned entries for the year. Early entry can serve many good purposes, including vital 'live' preparation for later exams.

It seems that barely a term goes by without another sudden change to GCSE examinations. Worst of all, these changes are often made in the middle of students' courses of study, making it impossible to plan properly or to focus on learning rather than constant administrative change. They changed grade boundaries between exam sittings; they dropped the vital skills of speaking and listening from English mid-course; and now this latest announcement.

These changes are often timed to coincide with party conferences or similar events, leading us to fear that students and schools are just collateral damage in party political squabbles.

Head teachers are ambitious for every child in their school. They are the first to admit that our education must constantly improve. We have achieved much - our schools are unrecognisable compared to 10 years ago - but we have far to go. We see no reason, other than the date of the next election, why change needs to be rushed without consultation or planning. Ultimately it is students who suffer.

We wanted to explain to you our position on these reforms: we believe they are disrupting your children's education and undermining their hard work. We wanted to let you know that we will continue to help students navigate the system as best we can. And we wanted to encourage you to contact politicians and let them know how the changes are affecting you and your family. Ministers are distant from the front line and the realities of teaching. They cannot see the confusion and chaos being created; nor do they have any respect for the views of the profession. They may listen to you.


Yours faithfully

Leaders in Secondary Education

Reproduced in full
9th October 2013
Dennis O'Sullivan

That Education Secretary? He’s not on the Level you know.

Posted Thursday 27th June 2013

You know how it is when you have a constant pain, a toothache perhaps, and it hurts so much you don't notice that your arm has fallen off? Well we’re all so intoxicated by the daily flatulence from the DfE that we sort of overlooked yet another bad smell. Maybe this one is a bit more like an itch that is so, so thrilling to scratch even though you end up bloody and sore.  When I spoke with 12 primary heads about this week’s latest noxious news they all giggled. Because, Education Secretary Gove, your thinking is so messed up  we now have to laugh.

At the moment, children are assessed on an 8 point scale starting at Level 1 and generally hitting levels 6 and 7 by age 14. In a well taught school students know what level they are at and what they need to do to get to the next level. There are level descriptors on walls showing what knowledge, skills and understanding are assessed at each level and we praise their effort and ambition and applaud attainment of the next level.

Gove is doing away with assessment, at levels 1-8 because, “Parents don't understand them.”

Apparently, the abolition of levels, "Will help to ensure that schools concentrate on making sure that all pupils reach the expected standard, rather than on labelling differentiated performance." (June 6^th 2012) I haven’t a clue what he means.

By June 13^th 2013 Gove recited a little speech abolishing levels, just as 11 year olds had sat his new Level 6 tests, demanded by Gove, to test the most able. And just as Ofsted has recommended expectations of secondary school attainment be raised to 4 levels of progress – for next year – there will be no levels to measure.

So how will we hold schools accountable? And how will we hold the government  accountable without levels? Oh no, Michael, people might see a plan here: Wreck the education system and remove the measures for showing your demolition. Your Year Zero figures will doubtless impress.

Gove says, “Schools will be able to introduce their own approaches to formative assessment.” We can make up our own system of notlevels and Ofsted will inspect us using our assessments which will be in non universal notlevels. Every school may use different systems. Honestly, I am not making this up.

As  Headteacher I now have to think of new ways of measuring, testing, recording and reporting.

Could we use the music scale EGBDF. I can see a weakness in that this scale allows a mediocre middle grade (B) and might encourage expectations of an average, and as the mathematical genius Gove told the Select Committee, all schools have to be above average.

How about we measure children on the likelihood of making it to Oxbridge: measure their ability on family income, private health and education, house price and model of car. The USANDTHEM scale, simplified to US for a straight pass/fail, like the old 11+ separating the elite at age 11.

With all scales one needs to work out where it starts and ends. With the DONKEY scale for measuring common sense from politicians it really doesn’t matter which end of the donkey we start with.

I think Gove has decided he invented and now owns the universal system of numbers and counting. Only last month he smugly announced the replacement of our GCSE grades A*-G with the numbers 1-8. They must be different 1-8 numbers to the ones he’s abolishing for 14 year olds.

So, Gove’s new number scale at 16 is 1-8 with the potential to make it 1-9 or 1-10. The now abandoned A* worth, say, 96% but when a student achieves 100% he can give them a 9 or 10 and of course, Spinal Tap fans, I bet Gove’s scale can go up to 11.

We know that Gove likes anglocentric history, where we jolly good britisher chaps taught the foreigners to play cricket in our benevolent empire. His new history curriculum, devised by him, will make sure children tackle history chronologically. In junior schools we could measure progress on the Henry Scale: Henry I, Henry II, Henry III up to Henry VIII. Or if we want to tie in with the new curriculum and go further than roman numerals we could follow the scale Conquer, Rape, Attack, Pillage, based on the Iceni Queen Boudicca family experience of the Romans and, of course, easy to recall as an acronym.

Yr 7 will be doing Ethelred the Unready, Tom the Small-minded, Billy the Kid,  Harry the Longdrawnout and Macavity the Mystery Cat. Will parents really find this less confusing than the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4?

By Year 13when they might get to study contemporary history everyone can be measured on the great man scale – the OMICHAEL scale, with O being finally the ultimate achievement – maybe called an O level?

I quite like the idea that we should use the Mr Men Scale for assessment. I’m unsure of the correct order but Mr Self Denial, Mr Having a Laugh,  Mr No, Not me Guvnor, Mr 3 wise Monkeys, Mr Failure and Little Miss Perfect will be in there.

Achievement could be measured by organs in any order appreciated by our education secretary. Dear parent, Mary has achieved a lung grade in Biology, an Ear grade in Music….and an Eye grade overall. (I Levels!)

This is getting very silly, I know but how about the Small, Bigger, Very Big Indeed, Bloody Enormous scale for intellectual capacity?

Finally, I reckon I have the Gove-friendly scale

Dim
Rather average
Jolly good
Spiffing
A mickle above a muckle (because many a mickle makes a muckle)

Dennis O'Sullivan

Stop Press:

Looking for what next to abolish or destroy Michael turned to his wife and purred , “Shoes, shoes…..” He had read that in some countries some kids walked miles to school without shoes and one of them went on to Oxford University. Sorry about the image of Gove purring. I hope you don’t have to sleep with that.

Unlike MPs and Bankers, Teachers Earn Every Penny.

Posted 23rd May 2013

I want to address and dismiss performance related pay (PRP) for teachers but the bombastic Gove appals me again, and again, I dread his daily edicts.  He now dismisses headteachers who disagree with him (the mild mannered National Association of Headteachers) and the teachers unions with whom he will meet but not negotiate. Yesterday he has told Northern Ireland and Wales Education ministers to go away if they oppose him. They are all, “enemies of promise.”

Turning to new “laws” on teachers’ pay:  I think it is fair to propose that teachers would like to be paid more. The (PRP) logic seems straightforward.  The job of teachers is to promote student achievement. Therefore pay teachers more for better results and they will get better results.  Apparently this approach temporarily raised sales of Mars Bars, albeit at the expense of reduced sales of other chocolates.

There is nothing wrong in examining and developing the best practice in our schools. There is nothing wrong with getting rid of policies, people and roles that restrict student achievement. There is nothing wrong with providing staff  training opportunities which lead to progression, better pay and promotion. Good heads should be able to identify good teachers; good schools should be led by a vision and should be able to value its staff and their likelihood of achieving the vision.

Mr Wise Monkey Gove’s new education law says that teachers can only progress on the main pay spine according to performance related criteria. We all know that will mean exam results as we live in a results driven system. Get me more GCSEs in English and Maths and I must forgive all sins: shout and bully the kids, deal rote learning cards to the innocent , repeat and repeat and repeat the narrowest ranges of knowledge; go mnemonic-wild, drill and recite in some  Dickensian nightmare and jump up and down screaming, ”Pass! Pass! Pass!”

Before becoming a teacher I spent a week in a boys’ school in Neasden at the time of their Annual, Big Deal, End of Summer Term General Knowledge Test. The Remedial class, housed in a separate building, came first across the whole of the school. I was stunned by this contradiction to my lower expectations but just as I was fitting the barbed wire underpants I was told that they had practised the questions, over and over, throughout the year. Maximum performance pay to that teacher!

Whilst the PRP policy laudibly aims to attract and retain the best teachers schools will not receive one penny of additional money so for every teacher getting extra pay it seems likely that another teacher will be paid less. The better your classes do, according to the most objective measures we can muster, the more you get paid, as long as we can pay someone less.

If we pay by results then our teacher of Year 11 Set 1 Maths will do nicely, whilst our Set 8, who make slower progress, should earn their teacher a pay cut. Both sets had different teachers two years previously, and different teachers four years before that.  These teachers should be rewarded or fined for the foundations they laid. The junior school teachers who did or did not correctly instil times tables mastery should be hunted down and deified or imprisoned as part of PRP. Goodness knows who gets the money when we have team teaching, split classes or additional help.

Apparently, teachers should be rewarded with extra money for students behaving well. Is that the silent ones or those lively team players in simulations and group challenges?  Notices proclaiming, “Noise costs pay!” could replace stunning art displays.  Ofsted said Chauncy students’ behaviour was impeccable – do I get the cash or should it go to the cook and the caretaker?

Detour into what our detractors call the real world and we find the best example of PRP: the bankers. They received millions of pounds in bonuses to sell mortgages to unemployed no-income families.  Bankers fixed interest rates to make a killing and sold needless insurance and profitless endowment policies to millions of people in order to earn their bonuses. Bankers are credited with causing our current world-wide recession and yet fantastic bonuses are still being paid whilst low income working families are battered by austerity budgets throughout Europe. PRP will take away your shame.

Painfully I once worked with glass fibre matting in a Park Royal factory. I was on a 22 day contract with a promised bonus for early job completion. Without protective clothing my skin was torn by billions of needle-sharp fibres ripping it apart at every move. There were two of us working and we toiled dramatically well and quickly to complete in 8 bloodied days. Relieved to be gone we received our pay with a £2.50 bonus – about 6% of what we saved our employer. So what price helping a child pass History GCSE?

Trying to get MPs to do what they are employed to do is nigh impossible. Liberal Democrats should lose all their pay for promising not to raise university tuition fees and then raising them, The Tories should lose theirs for failing to reduce our national deficit whilst blaming the poor, and Labour should be pilloried in stocks and rendered penniless for failing to provide any opposition.

Back to teachers. Yes, they want more pay and their unions will take them out on fruitless one day strikes to press for better pay. One does not have to go all the way with new age thinking or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to know that teachers respond to higher order aspects of humanity. Teachers are not MPs or bankers and they will not be driven solely by money; even keeping them poor will not stop them. There is, unfortunately, empirical evidence for this.

School staff work together as a school or it is probably a poor school. Teachers respond to a degree of autonomy, the freedom to try new ideas with the respect and recognition that comes from student, parent and colleague appreciation. They want to be challenged rather than alienated from their labour. They work best when trusted and they work to an old fashioned notion of vocation: doing well by their students according to moral imperatives. And, they enjoy their work, are happy, involved and excited when it’s about teaching and achievement.

10 years ago our school was given around £25,000 from central government as a reward for raising achievement. We split it equally between, teachers, assistants and caretaker alike. They all contributed to the students’ achievement. That is my kind of PRP at work.

I know that some headteachers  are wondering if the new PRP scales will give them the opportunity to tell some teachers that they are not good enough to progress. We should already be doing this as part of our daily work and using established systems for dealing with under-performing staff, with a timetable for improvement or exit. Waiting for the PRP hammer is at best unwieldly, at worst, cowardly.

 

I think it is the headteacher’s  job to protect and improve the pay and conditions of our staff, not to scurry around looking for opportunities to put them down. In 35 years I have seen the quality of teaching soar and if Mr Mad Swivel-eyed Gove was left to praise himself entirely alone with a mirror in an otherwise silent cell there could be endless options to help us create a magnificent world-class education system.

 Dennis O'Sullivan

 

Bring back O Levels? Don't be silly!

Posted 12th September 2012

When I took my O-level in English in 1968 they might have asked: What do you call someone who believes that everything was better when they were a boy? Of course we had multiple choice questions – a sort of pin the tail on the donkey/the answer is already given/don’t worry about spelling etc. 

So choices might have included:

1.) A recidivist fantasist who failed his driving test 6 times.

2.) A nostalgia- tinted obsessive who wore a kilt at his English university

3.) A self- inflated person somehow made secretary of state for education

The trick was in knowing which of the three correct answers was the one the examiner wanted. However, in what was largely a fact and date learning curriculum,  we spent many, many lessons doing past papers to learn how to second guess the examiners and the teachers all targeted their lessons on the questions most likely to be on the exam papers. Whole periods in history were omitted in favour of likely exam questions – my grammar school didn't much like studying The English Civil War, The rise of Trade Unions or anything suggesting Catholic clergy did anything untoward.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the spontaneous utterance of one’s thoughts (How many MPs fiddled their expenses ?

a) virtually all of them including ministers in all major political parties

b) very few and they went to prison for theft

c) these people are in charge of our country – they wouldn't be so immoral)

The problem comes when the utterer has power over young people’s lives, their futures, their careers, their self respect and their contribution to society. Even more so when their agenda seems to consist of saying,”You’re rubbish.”

20 per cent of children sat O-levels, so 80 per cent didn't get qualifications. Will we be happy with massive failure? In America, where the universities rank very highly on international scales, 71 per cent graduate High School and use this as a passport to further education or jobs. Why, on earth should we be looking instead to Singapore for a way forward.

The population of Sigapore is

a) about the same as USA

b) just like the UK’s

c) 5 million and 63 per cent of adults had no secondary education at all.

By the way in 1968 it was cold and we had no central heating, 2 TV channels, no computers, no mobile phones, few motor cars, many biased newspapers and very few ever took foreign holidays. Teachers did not need to be qualified and schools were crumbling Victorian celebrations of outdoor toilets. But, we had millions of manual jobs in coal mines, shipyards and docks and working mothers did some cleaning, office  or some shop work and generally stayed at home.

We can no longer dismiss 80 per cent of our population to educational failure in an unskilled economy. Yes, there are simple changes necessary to stabilise GCSEs: one exam board would be a start, an end to multiple qualifications for a single study would help, making A* grades exceptional might be useful. And no-one is doubting the importance of literacy, numeracy, communication and ICT skills. Oops, I forgot: Mr Gove has just removed ICT from the curriculum.

Dennis O'Sullivan