Why You Shouldn’t Think of Teaching

Has there ever been a more obvious time when UK politics uses “The Joker” as its theme, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.” Whatever else is true in these politically desperate times, Corbyn and Johnson pay little heed to education. There are 10.2 million school age kids in the UK but they don’t have a vote so they don’t matter. And, unlike many of the countries held up as examples of excellence, UK parents don’t always prioritise education when voting. An exaggerated pre-election spendthrift budget and we’re meant to forget the last decade of austerity?

We have a teacher recruitment crisis in our schools. Look at the number of unqualified, supply or overseas teachers employed in any school you know.

An 8% cut in school funding over the last 9 years (Institute for Fiscal Studies) and year on year below inflation pay deals ensures potential, budding and experienced teachers look elsewhere. The phrase, “Come on if you think you’re hard enough,” may aptly apply to some teachers’ lives in some London schools and there is a recruitment crisis in London as everywhere else. Today the government announced that new teachers will start on £30,000 in 2023. That’s sort of ignoring the fact that London teachers already start on £30,479.

It will help recruitment if teachers are better paid but this year’s unfunded 2.75% with inflation at 2.0% is hardly going to turn heads.

The most recently sacked education minister, Damian Hindes, told us to teach older students how often to change their bedsheets. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-48926535) There’s a man with his finger firmly on an alternative reality button – maybe it isn’t just Johnson, Stewart and Gove on various marching powders.

The new unelected (brief?) prime minister, Boris Johnson has privately, and expensively educated all his legitimate children. He has committed to “levelling up education,” which is a profoundly misleading and potentially meaningless term. (https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/analysis-the-prime-ministers-promise-to-level-up-school-funding/) He will ensure that our kids are funded to £5,000 which is less than 14-16 year olds already.

It’s a wonder that his eldest daughter survived school costing him £33,000 a year or his eldest son at the £27,500 a year Westminster School. His commitment to state education is only in the state schooling of his youngest daughter, Stephanie, but then he fought a court case to deny her existence. Boris does not understand nor want to understand the lives of working families or the challenges to their schools .

Recently, on my favourite 3 Counties Radio I was surprised to silence the presenter discussing teacher’s pay. I have a pay slip, dated October 2010 for one of our teachers and also his payslip in June 2019. His take home pay had gone up, in 9 years, by £5.52. Inflation was 17.7% for that period.

State funding of special needs is in crisis and there are so many SEND kids now. We have experts telling us that kids have SAD (Separation Anxiety Disorder) ODD (Opposition Defiant Disorder) ASD, ADHD, BAD (Behavioural Affective Disorder) EBD, MLD and SLD as well as a host of others requiring every adult in school to understand the condition and enact individual teaching programmes for maybe half the class.

My school receives not a penny extra to teach these children, and the increasing number of state schools refusing to admit or teach these children receive not a penny less. How can parents send their children to state comprehensive schools which routinely refuse to admit children the school considers ‘not good enough.’

I wonder how we plan for a child with Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) The disorder is typified by hostility, impulsivity, and recurrent aggressive outbursts. People with IED essentially “explode” into a rage despite a lack of apparent provocation or reason.

And she did!

Of the secondary school headteachers aged under 50 who were appointed in 2013, 31 per cent had left by 2016. One in five primary school headteachers quit their posts over the same time period, data from the Department for Education (DfE) reveals.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/05/05/almost-third-headteachers-now-leave-within-three-years-official/

If we had 30% of train drivers leaving within 3 years there would be an outcry and few trains. Who has ever shown that they care whether there’s a shortage of nurses or teachers?

At a time when parents are very busy and their kids are entrenched on social media and / or computer games, there are growing reports of stroppy parents displaying what I like, now, to term PPP (answers on a postcard please).

For politicians and Daily Mail journalists there is a simple solution to every problem in society : Schools should fix it.

We are responsible for Sex.

Ask your kids how much they enjoy their teachers delivering Sex Education and you can see why they don’t always think we are telling the truth. We employ a theatre group, Tip of the Iceberg, to work with our students on all sorts of Relationships, Expectations, Cyber Safety, LGBTQ+ awareness matters right at the centre of adolescents’ lives and worries.

Or I could do it and maybe teach them some of my catholic Irish prejudice and guilt.

We are expected to look out for Extremist Tendencies amongst our students and we have a legal duty to report children we fear are prone to extreme ideology (That’s EDL and Isis type groups)

In 2017/18, a total of 7,318 individuals were reported to Prevent , exactly 33% by schools and colleges (A fascinating government report:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/763254/individuals-referred-supported-prevent-programme-apr2017-mar2018-hosb3118.pdf)

Schools have to be on the lookout for cases of Female Genital Mutilation and we were instructed to talk with an African girl returning from holiday to check for signs of FGM. Thousands of teachers have done online training on this and we are happy to embrace women’s safety and it is shocking to read an official estimate of 137,000 women in the UK having suffered FGM (https://www.virtual-college.co.uk/resources/free-courses/recognising-and-preventing-fgm)

Our staff have raised over 1,000 Records of Concern about safeguarding, neglect, poverty, self-harm, eating disorders, depression, isolation, domestic abuse, drugged and drunk parents, bereavement, crime, bullying and violence in just 12 months. We work with numerous under-funded, hamstrung agencies to try to help the children and we employ as many support staff as our budget can bear.

We really do want to educate the child about the world and themselves and we would love to be able to point troubled children and parents to where they will receive practical help.

But, our jobs depend on the pointless KS2 SATs where 28% of our 10 year olds had extra help on top of the endless revision and there are 6 categories of underachievement with “Below, Below, Below, Below, Below, Below (age related expectations) now replaced by PK6. The kids need help not labels. The schools need to be let teach Art, Music, Geography, History, Technology. PE and the children need to be learning about problem solving, teamwork and resilience whilst enjoying being 10 years old. Or schools may hammer the subordinate adverbial clause, because SATs demand it (the last 4 words forming, of course a subordinate adverbial clause – look how useful that is.)

We are happy to do what we can and want to see the world a better place.

Knife crime is killing our children and we teach about knives, show stark videos , have police officers explaining to assembled kids, reformed gang members talking to parents and we stay vigilant. I permanently exclude anyone with a weapon in school but I’m not sure we can allay the fears of teenage boys outside our buildings.

We are also being asked to sort out

Gangs, Drugs and County Lines

Mental Health issues including anxiety, depression and self-harm

Obesity

Sexting and Access to Pornography.

We have been asked to identify children at possible risk of succumbing to Violent Crime. The Home Secretary has threatened teachers and nurses with arrest if they don’t notify the police of suspicions of children at risk. (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/teachers-and-nurses-could-be-responsible-for-not-spotting-youth-violence-warning-signs-a4106481.html?

As the curriculum grows in content and narrows in scope; we watch the arts relegated to lunchtime clubs and technology decimated by funding crises.

We have so, so many accountability measures, some imposed by over zealous ambitious assistant headteachers justifying their position and others by government departments almost clueless in their assumptions. Recently they demanded we fill a spreadsheet showing that all 172 children in Year 10 were studying Textiles at the same time because one group of 12 was so doing.

But our own school leaders seem obsessed with plans, meetings, targets, evaluations and allocating blame when they should be reducing the layers of management, clamouring for resources and celebrating their teachers’ work.

Is managing student behaviour getting any easier? Are the support services – like youth workers and mentors – in place to help disaffected children prosper in our areas of high unemployment and poor schools? Do we see signs that Mr Johnson wants to dedicate resources to building self-esteem, ambition and hope, or does he want to build prisons?

We are teaching more, better than ever before and teachers overcome government attacks as best they can. So when Michael Gove promised that more students will fail exams, we just worked harder. The proportion “passing” has got to stay the same each year and there will always be the artificial, harmful and unscientific 66-34 pass- fail figures published no matter how much better we teach and the kids learn.

Oh, for goodness sake, teaching is not worth the heartache.

So why on earth do they do it? Why Do Teachers Teach? I asked teachers and made notes of direct quotes:

• Within moments of entering the school a kid smiles hello.
• I come back in September and the children are so pleased to be back in school and they’ve all grown.
• Adults come up to me on the street to thank me.
• I’ll never forget the boy who 10 years later called at my home to thank me for saving his life. All I’d done was spend some time encouraging his ambition when everyone else was just frightened by his solvent abuse.
• There’s a rush of seeing the results for my exam classes.
• The realisation that I have helped them achieve and move on in learning.
• Sometimes I can be the only person who listens to a child, who cares what they think and wants them to develop as people.
• Being trusted by the students.
• I love it when they challenge preconceptions.
• Being around young minds.
• I love my subject; I think it’s really important and helps young people grow intellectually.
• It’s amazing when a student opts to study my subject when they have a chance not to : GCSE, A Level University.
• Seeing kids enjoy learning, particularly when it’s in my subject.
• When a student achieves what she thought she couldn’t.
• Seeing kids learn and knowing - I did that.
• Watching children’s knowledge , skills and understanding develop over time.
• Kids are so funny.
• Teaching is never boring.
• Every day is different, every class changes according to the time of day, a wasp or the wind coming from outside the classroom or from inside a child.
• Making a difference to students’ lives.
• Sometimes helping break a family cycle of underachievement, unemployment and poverty.
• I love having the freedom to teach, trusted by SLT and free of bureaucratic restrictions and petty criticism.
• Being able to try different things in the classroom, to experiment and keep trying to improve.
• Nothing, anywhere in my life beats the lightbulb moment – when a child “GETS IT”
• I work long hours in term time and have great holidays.

Our teachers have risen above the political interfering, insults from Michael Gove, apathy, ignorance and condescension from the Eton Boys. Teachers will be upset by the odd shouting parents and rarely suggest the cause of dispute is really the parent’s own problems, issues and struggles. There are troubled kids – we didn’t create social inequality, unemployment, drug, alcohol and domestic abuse – and we try to help them as best we can. That half the people in prison were excluded from school is a result of social problems and awful support, not caused by teacher indifference. Our teachers love what they do and they do it with all their energies and commitment. In happy schools we are cult-like in our obsessions to help children learn about the world and their place in it. Some of us have done decades hoping that we will help develop the changers, leaders and good people of the near future and yes, there is no more moral or political job in society. We are missionaries and agitators, challenging conformist ideology. Outside of family, our students learn post 16 that they never meet anyone, anywhere who cares more about them than their teachers.

So, why teach?

You still don’t know?

I Love Ofsted

Jed slept soundly. He had arrived late and I had guided him to his seat and given him the materials being used in the lesson. There weren’t many; it was 1979 and the queue for the banda machine was not unlike the Black Friday rush for TVs in ASDA. It was a well heated room up three flights of stairs and I understood that Jed may be tired; after all who knows the daily experience of others prior to our lessons. I let him sleep quietly on and the class soon forgot he was there. It wasn’t a bad lesson as I recall; I was probably doing something personal with a poem but regardless, Jed slept on. At the end of the lesson the class and I connived for them to leave really quietly, sharing the joke.

It was my first year of teaching in an interesting East London comprehensive so I woke the LEA advisor for English and newly qualified teachers and asked how he rated my lesson. Jed must have offered something but it wasn’t memorable. I was promoted 4 times in 9 years at that school and Jed’s dreamy assessment was the only time I was ever observed teach.

School management teams did not observe us; teacher tutors were yet to be invented and LEAs were weak on monitoring. We needed someone to observe good teaching and disseminate good practice rather than leaving each teacher in an island, and each school in a desert. Standards of teaching, discipline and management were poor in many schools. It would be another 13 years until Ofsted was created in 1992.

I was first observed by an Ofsted Inspector in the mid 1990s. Our head managed to successfully challenge 30 judgements made by lead inspector Valerie  and the report ended up as nonsense with half complete sentences. I passed her in the car park and for some reason I still don’t understand, the inspector told me that she would stalk me throughout my career. She left Ofsted soon afterwards.

Mynext inspectors, at Chauncy, were a local authority team who criticised a languages carousel that the deputy lead inspector, the local authority’s Languages advisor, had himself helped create.

The next team was led by a tweedy, bejewelled Lady Joan and a gentleman who was distraught to come across a tomato ketchup sachet that a child had stamped on. His emotional  upset was decisive.

Ofsted team number 4 told us we would need a value added up around 1030 to get an outstanding grade. When questioned at national level about a local school receiving the outstanding grade with a value added of 998 I was told that school had shown progress. A nearby school got Grade 1 overall seemingly because the courteous male head charmed the lead lady inspector. I’ve never charmed an Ofsted inspector in what is now 5 inspections.

“Chauncy is an exciting and inspiring place ,” declared lead inspector of Team 5. We benefitted from her background as an English teacher even if she didn’t like my repeatedly quoting the John Lennon title, “How do you sleep/”

Here’s a thing. You stand a better chance of a good written Ofsted Report if the inspector is an English graduate. Some of them can’t write and at least two have been found to have used the “cut and paste” technique (Academies Week 06-09-14)

A friend has  abandoned his own Ofsted Training in disgust when his school was unfairly inspected  last month. The lead inspector steadfastly refused to follow Ofsted rules and advice. Whatever the Ofsted guidance it is the lead inspector who interprets and can destroy.

Guess who you complain to if unhappy with  Ofsted nspectors? Well, Ofsted, of course.

A nearby Headteacher was told to shut up by an inspector shouting at her as he dismissed the school’s achievements. No less than Wilshaw himself invited her to his office so he could apologise for disgraceful Ofsted behaviour. Like bullies everywhere the brave Wilshaw didn’t turn up – at his own office.

I have two local colleagues upset by a Grade 2 (Good) Ofsted and mealy mouthed, semi- literate, negative prose . Their conduct on inspection had left a bitter taste and thoughts of alternative employment.

Teaching is such a joyous fulfilment for most teachers but just how powerful is the unjustified, data driven misrepresentation of a lifetime’s work that one can receive almost at the whim of an inspector.

Teachers all over the country are hounded by flapping headteachers preparing them for Ofsted. Meeting after endless, distracting, tiresome preparation for Ofsted meeting forcing teachers to worry about looking good to Ofsted rather than helping children learn. Teachers walk away from their vocation over Ofsted, and many headteachers have been sacked on poor reports.

It might be easier if the Head of Ofsted wasn’t’ a bully himself. I well remember visiting Wilshaw’s St Bons in Newham in the 1980s.  A school characterised by teachers on corridors shouting at point blank range at students. Discipline was very tough. Expectations of academic achievement were high and the school made great strides up the new league tables. There are those who think the ends justifiy the means.

Mossborne Academy was created for and by the now knightly Wilshire and expectations are fantastically high. The uniform is one of those nice expensive ones, students may not gather in groups larger than 3 and parents failing to attend admissions interviews have had their children’s school place declined. Illegal of course,  but the message is clear: you will do precisely what we say or you will leave.

Strangely the only employee from Mossborne I know, a teacher highly rated by the head  is almost useless. Maybe the ethos and student compliance can carry the weakest teachers.

I have many stories about Ofsted and even though my inspections have always given us “Good” you might think I just don’t like other people’s rules, measures of success or inspectors themselves. And you would be right: anarcho syndicalism is a state of heart and soul

HOW TO SUCCEED WITH OFSTED

Expel difficult children.

Don’t take weak kids into school.

Select at age 11.

And now to expand:

Billy was a troubled Year 7 child.  We worked with him until it was clear that we were doing nothing for him and he was spoilng others’ chances. We could easily have expelled him and he would be gone from all accountability measures. We knew that expulsion would druin him  so we found expensive alternative provision. Billy came back at the end of Year 11 to thank  us.

RAISE is the official booklet showing how different subjects and groups of students have achieved. Ofsted use Raise to condemn or praise schools, regardless of other aspects of education. In Raise, green is good; blue is bad.

Billy was the defining factor in turning 13 different categories blue. A more sensible Headteacher would have expelled him for the sake of Ofsted. I am fond of quoting songs and poems at inspectors, so when faced with the news that our success as humanitarians with Billy made us failures in their terms I gave them  some Owen:

“Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Oh, what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?.”

Ofsted thought I was speaking in tongues. The poem is called “Futility”

Google  “School Performance Tables” and you will see that secondary schools are measured on the ways different groups of children perform. How do SEN, Free School Meals, white boys with Level 3s at age 11 achieve in the school at age 16. Schools fail inspections if they don’t “close the gap.”

Wander round your local schools’ performance tables and wonder at the inclusion of SUPP (for suppressed)  This is where there are so few low attainers on entry at age 11 that the school has no significant gap to close.

Look at the most selective schools and you will see that they also have very few kids on Free School Meals, so no gap to close.

Look at Grammar schools and be in awe of how few disadvantaged kids are allowed in. The myth of  grammar schools aiding the escape from poverty of bright working class kids is borne out by their Raise, their government Performance Tables and their Ofsted reports.

Well done you schools.

Able children make more progress than the less able – controversial? To say that a child who has managed a Level 2 by the age of 11, having made 2 levels of progress in 6 years will be able to make 3 levels of progress in the next 5 years does not hold up mathematically and certainly not in practice. For a Level 5 child at age 11 to make 3 levels of progress in the next five years is comparatively easy. Ofsted will measure your school against levels of progress so I suggest you do what so many high achieving schools somehow, accidentally, manage – keep ‘em out.

And now, in colour for the first time in 28 blogs and  50,000 words ,in graphical form, the work by @JTrevorBurton taken from his” Eating Elephants” site.  Clearly, schools with a low average point score at age 11 really struggle to let Ofsted see them as Outstanding. Schools with the highest point score on entry, miraculously, seem to find it a matter of  near certainty to be given an Outstanding Grade..

Seems simplistic? Ofsted rely massively on data.

The brighter the intake the easier to show progress.

If progress is outstanding, teaching must be outstanding.

If progress and teaching are outstanding behaviour and management must be outstanding.

QED.

Ofsted Grade by Prior Attainment as of 30 April 2014

A few notes of explanation:

• These are the 2,684 secondary schools in England with both a KS2 prior attainment score and a current Ofsted grade.
• 85% of these schools have a KS2 average point score (APS) of higher than 26, but lower than 30 i.e. the four columns labelled 26, 27, 28, 29 in the chart
• The number of schools in each APS “bucket” is shown at the top of the bar so there are 748 schools with KS2 APS of 27 or higher, but less than 28.

Ofsted has been criticised for knee-jerk reactions to the latest scandals. Thus they descended on Birmingham last summer  and suddenly two schools rated, by Ofsted, as Outstanding, were now, after all, Seriously Weak. Ofsted never explained how their inspections failed to notice the serious weaknesses. But they certainly hammered the schools when the world was watching.

The tragic case of Baby P in North London throws up another Ofsted oddity. In 2007 Haringey Social Services, inspected by Ofsted, was given a “Good” grade. When the poor boy was murdered and the case took over national news, the record of the Good grade had disappeared to be replaced by an Inadequate ruling. And Ofsted ducked all criticism whilst damming those it had inspected..

This isn’t nice is it? The head of social services got her day, and payout in court, but she was destroyed by the press.

I know it is going back a way but the Head of Ofsted 1994 -2000, Chris Woodhead who created the bullying regime, making  headline , announcements like, “30,000 bad teachers in our schools,” never liked the question about his full relationship with a sixth form girl whilst “teaching” her and then lying on oath about it when challenged It was legal back then. He said teachers didn’t deserve a payrise whilst demanding, and getting, a 30% rise for himself. (New Statesman  26-04-99)

Academies run by a government approved superhead, Rachel de Souza, were so well informed of the date Ofsted would visit that they imported star teachers to perform on the inspection days ( Guardian 17-08-14) Accurate to the day emails from De Souza saying “only 3 weeks to go until Ofsted visit” are a mite embarrassing but I guess it’s OK to look after your mates in these matters.

The Academy Chain, AET, really really, really can’t rest easy now that their trustee, David Hoare, has been appointed Chair of Ofsted. So good is AET that it was barred from taking on more schools amid reports of falling standards (Guardian 12-08-14)

The underperforming AET chain of academies could tell staff that Ofsted had given notice that it would inspect 12 of its schools in June  2014.And they were spot on.

The National Union of Teachers – a voice rarely heard by Wilshaw – claims, “Ofsted no longer has the confidence of the teaching profession.”

They are Gove’s enemies of promise so how about Primary School headteachers:

“The NAHT can no longer work with Ofsted’s adversarial approach.”

The Logal Government Association, again in 2014, said that  a series of u-turns and leaks had “undermined Ofsted’s credibility.”

School management and local education authorities failed to promote the highest standards in schools. This does not mean that the imposition of an aggressive regime dominated by data and fear is the way to treat teachers and school communities. We need a fair and impartial professional view of what makes a good school and this is certainly not a perpetually Ofsted- ready school where we justify actions on what Ofsted want. 

On Wednesday of this week Wilshaw addressed the nation in ways that allow the press to believe that we are in a perilous state. We are not. Teaching and achievement in schools is light years ahead of where we were when Ofsted was created in 1992.

Ofsted has not complained that the political interference of the last 4 months means that GCSEs are now harder to pass. Ofsted did not comment on the 10% national decline in pass rates that resulted. The bar below which schools are said to be failing has been raised again by another 10%. So more schools are bound to fail Ofsted’s GCSE driven inspections.

What a pity that the Chief Inspector of Schools has to impose guilt to get on the radio.

If only Ofsted’s ideology had progressed beyond bullying in those 20 years . If Ofsted leaders could see a way towards constructive conversations with schools packed full of professionals working their hardest we would welcome their help – maybe in a loving embrace. 

Dennis O'Sullivan (Headteacher)