Today the TES reports on two teachers who found ‘pupils’ unruly behaviour and the demands of the National Curriculum too stressful’ and consequently have left the teaching profession for… the cleaning profession. In spite of - or because of – a combined 13 years in teaching, sisters Kirsty and Fiona Innes have given up school life to set up Aardvark Cleaning.
Although it might sound a rather ridiculous story, within it is a very serious issue. We have come to the point where disaffection from teaching has literally made disinfecting toilets a preferable job. This is a deeply worrying indictment on conditions in our schools. Equally concerning is the fact that life as a teacher has become so notorious that such moves are not even regarded as implausible.
Whilst not all teachers are leaving the classroom to take up with their bucket and mops, too many of them are leaving. As well as discipline issues ousting teachers there is the persistent, and above all avoidable, problem of unnecessary but mandatory paperwork. As a National Union of Teachers representative commented, “the workload continues to drive teachers away…it is still excessive and the amount of time teachers spend working at home preparing and marking is too great.”
The disparity under New Labour between teacher workload and real improvement is proof enough that current DfES diktat is fundamentally flawed.
Comments (1)
Nope, it's happening more and more.
The NC is a mixture of the trivial and boring. It is laughably watered down is subjects like Science (no ... science !) and ICT (all presentational) where knowledgeable staff are in short supply. Whereas when I started teaching you got a syllabus with a list of topics for the exam which you could approach according to your strengths, you now have the "mandatory units" ; they aren't actually mandatory but they are made so by some schools and bodies like OFSTED. They're also (in ICT) mindlessly boring and plain dumb and it's in incredible detail. Some contain stage directions !
You don't *do* stuff any more, you plan, make presentations, it's like turning schoolchildren into a cross between PR men and consultants.
The children actually like *doing* things - chemistry experiments for example - and these are now more or less off the syllabus.
Paperwork is insane. All Govt monitoring bodies want paperwork, which is viewed as evidence of doing things. This means before OFSTED people spend ages writing up things that are completely useless. The same problems apply ; the total lack of flexibility, the central control, the pressure to follow mandated Government systems which are crass.
Behaviour is bad and collapsing. The Govt claim that their new rules grant teachers powers to deal with it.
This is b*ll*cks.
Teachers have *always* had the right to restrain, to intervene, to discipline and so on. The problem is the way it is interpreted and investigated, not how it is expressed in law.
Any complaint under any circumstances, however trivial, however farcical, and whatever the motives of the complainant can lead to a full blown prosecution. (look at Van Trotsenburg as one of hundreds of examples), while others are just ignored.
If you quite correctly restrain a pupil who is about to beat up another one (say), and that pupil complains, or gets a bruise (a distinct possibility if you are restraining a 6' 14 st 15 year old) and complains, you can be subjected to a full trawl for complaints - the Police go round repeatedly asking current and/or former pupils to make complaints, name in the paper as a 'child abuser', suspended for months or years, bye bye career even if you want to go back.
Posted by Paul | April 29, 2006 8:41 AM
Posted on April 29, 2006 08:41