Author: theprimaryhead

Mock(ery)steds

theprimaryhead4 Comments

My highly esteemed friend on twitter @emmaannhardy posed a question the other evening:

I keep hearing about Mocksteds in schs & the crazy pressure they put staff under.  I wondered what you thought to Mocksteds @HarfordSean?

Now, I am not Sean Harford and I don’t know what one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors and the National Director for Schools has to say on the matter, but Emma’s tweet got me thinking. I have never experienced a Mocksted and I don’t think I would ever organise one for my school. Not least because I agree with Emma’s point about the ‘crazy pressure they put staff under’ but more for the simple reason that I don’t see the point.
Why would a Head decide to carry out a pretend Ofsted in their school? As far as I can work out, there are three reasons:

1. They just can’t wait!
It’s like a child who simply has to open a Christmas present on Christmas Eve because they can’t bear the tension anymore! The inspection could be a result of two things, one being that the school is long overdue an inspection and the Head can’t resist a sneaky peak at what the judgement might be, so they draft in an ‘in it for the cash’ A-team bunch of Ofsted mercenaries who will put you through your paces and give you a judgement that you may or may not get in the real world. The second is that the Head can’t wait to leave the school but Ofsted aren’t going to turn up in the foreseeable future and they need something to put on the CV, so, again, they draft in the Mocksted team and hope that the sentence: ‘A group of paid people visited my school and gave me a judgement that has all the validity of a forged passport’ will get them the job. My advice: patience my friends, patience. They’ll come eventually and, when they do, you won’t be able to wave your Mocksted judgement in the air while spluttering ‘But, but but…’ when it hasn’t gone your way.

2. They just don’t know!
Far more distressing is the possibility that a Head doesn’t know how good the school is and considers the Mocksted to be some kind of fortune telling genie that’ll do the job for them. There is the argument that a new Head, who has arrived at a point where the last Ofsted was a long time ago and the next one may be a long way ahead, may wish to draw a line in the sand by getting the Mockers in. But, in all honesty, surely the cons outweigh the pros? If you’re trying to prove to a school that they’re not as good as they think they are, then for your own sanity, find a more inclusive way of getting that message across to the people you’re meant to be leading. If you’re not a new Head, then shame on you. I mean, come on, muster up a smidgen of courage and put your own judgement on the SEF and see if it sticks. If you honestly don’t know, then, if you’re a locally maintained school ask your school improvement officer; if you’re an academy, ask the executive Head; and if you’re a Free school, well, go and ask a Toby Young, I suppose.

3. They don’t know you!
This is basically the same as number 2 insofar as it suggests that the senior leaders don’t have a strong enough handle on your capabilities as a teacher. Now, this may be because they don’t know how to judge teaching or it may be that they know their judgement of you but they want to check how you ‘perform’. This is rather distasteful and belies the whole point of triangulated evidence over time (which is soooooo 2015) and would suggest the SLT don’t keep very good evidence. It could of course mean that they do know you and are wise to the fact that you literally have a nervous breakdown whenever you’re observed and they’re worried how you’re going to react when an inspector walks in. Again though, I don’t see how a Mocksted is going to help, especially as you actually may need some help, as in support, not just practice in crying into your book corner until the nasty inspector walks away.

Whatever the reason for a Mocksted, I personally think that there are more effective ways for a leader to a) judge and b) improve their own school. My biggest reason for not conducting a Mocksted of my own, however, is consistency. There is just no guarantee that on any given day, any given observers will judge a school the same way. When anyone visits your school, the only variable is the group of visitors filling in the forms and yet the variability in consequences is gargantuan. Judgements can vary between senior leaders conducting observations in the same school; school improvement officers will think differently when visiting the same school; and the same goes for HMI inspectors and Ofsted inspection teams. To conduct a Mocksted and to then expect consistency in judgements forever after is a nonsense. Now I’m not saying that is correct, but it’s the way it is. So, why put your staff through it? Why put yourself through it? Save your money, get into your classrooms, work with your teachers and forget all about Mocksted and Ofsted…well, between 12:15pm on Wednesday and Monday morning anyway.

Postscript

A piece of advice I heard about ten years too late but am now going to try out…

Don’t make judgements anyway.

There is no law that says your self-evaluation has to contain an actual judgement based on the Ofsted framework. So, don’t bother. Know what is good. Know what needs improving. Get on with it. Let the external observers do the dirty work of judging for you and allow yourself the dignity of carrying on improving outcomes for your children with the professionalism you’ve earned.

No laughing matter

theprimaryhead6 Comments


 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you get if you cross a perfectly healthy, young, competent and determined teacher with five years of dedicated service?

I don’t know, what do you get if you cross a perfectly healthy, young, competent and determined teacher with five years of dedicated service?

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with an occupational health referral.

As we stagger across the half way line of the academic year like a decrepit donkey devotedly trekking along a beach with a grubby child on its back, I take time to pause and reflect on the state of teaching today. I say ‘take time to pause’- what I actually mean is ‘collapse into a heap on the floor’.

When I started teaching, the level of rigour in the profession, according to my more experienced colleagues, had increased significantly. Gone, I was told, were the days where you would decide what to teach whilst driving to work. Now, systematic schemes of work, progression through key stages, detailed planning, assessments and a clear expectation that children should learn stuff, were the order of the day. We even had national strategies that explained how children should be taught key concepts. Some professionals felt it had gone too far but pretty much everyone (and by everyone I mean the three people in the tiny school I worked at) agreed that the quality of education and the professionalism of teachers had improved.

I, for one inexperienced NQT, felt so lucky that, conceptually, I was so well resourced. The maths unit plans, in particular, I thought, were amazing. I mean, sure, there was no way anyone could actually get though the content of one lesson in a week let alone an hour but they sure helped my teaching.

I worked hard and I was happy. Even when my Head told me to take down a display and do it again because it was, I think the word she used was ‘pants’, I didn’t mind. I worked hard, I was happy and I had time to do what my job required. I don’t think I worked harder than any of my colleagues and best of all, we were clear about our roles and responsibilities. I taught there for four years and at no point did I consider not being a teacher.

Then I became a maths leader at a different school. This school was significantly bigger and in more challenging circumstances. The work ethic of the teachers, particularly the younger ones, was incredible. We all worked tirelessly to support our children. It was really, really tough and I can remember having many conversations with our Deputy where I lamented that no matter what I did the children didn’t seem to be making progress. Don’t worry, she would say, you’re managing to keep them in the class aren’t you, the learning will follow. I never gave up and the children did, little by very little, learn. The sense of camaraderie is the thing I miss the most about that school. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with such an energised team. We worked hard; admittedly it now felt as though we had less time to do our job, but this was mostly due to the challenging and complex nature of our pupils’ lives. I am confident when I say, however, that as a staff, we were really, really happy.

Now, as Maths Leader I naturally had more to do than just teach – but I don’t think the ‘just’ teachers worked less hard than me. At no point did I, or anyone else that worked there, ever have conversations about leaving education.

Then I became a teaching Deputy in another school. At this point, I think it’s fair to say, my workload massively increased. There were days when I felt that nobody worked harder than me and no one had as wide a remit as me. (At this point, all you deputies take a bow…you know it’s true.)

At this point in my career, however, the job started to get bigger for everyone. Yes I was working hard on a variety of things, but teachers were working harder too…and they were ‘just’ teaching. How could they possibly be spending as much time on one job as I was on many? They weren’t slow workers and SLT did as much as we could to streamline tasks and procedures and create consistent systems and yet…the car park remained full until the caretaker kicked us all out.

We were all still very happy (well most of us) but we definitely had less time due to the ever increasing demands of the job. I would also say that at key points throughout the year, there started to exist conversations between the young and the old more experienced about how long one could stay in teaching.

And now I am a Head. I work very hard. But I am no longer at the top of that tree. I can’t think of many people who work less hard than my good self. Teachers work incredibly hard. They have to. If they drop the pace for a single 24 hours, it seems the task of getting back on top of things is gargantuan. Expectations have never been higher, workload has never been denser and remits have never been wider.

We have entered into an age of education where success can never be fully attained…there is always something that needs doing better, to a higher standard, across more areas. Progress isn’t just a circle with no clear start and end point, it is a number 8 on its side: an infinite trap with ever decreasing margins of success.

It is unsustainable.

The powers that be are not helping either. By constantly updating, replacing and inventing new strategies, frameworks, curriculums and expectations, in conjunction with removing standardised checking systems, they have built a profession not on shifting sands but on quick sand. Teachers do not know where they are anymore; all they know is that they are sinking and the more they work the more they go under.

Good senior leaders will try to help by attempting to make sense of this new world. But, in reality, this is like trying to smash a square peg through a round hole when the peg is made out of clouds and the hole is actually a brick wall. Bad senior leaders will be getting everyone else working harder on meaningless administrative tasks in the hope that nobody notices and praying that when the graphs are printed out, they will at least look pretty.

When I look around my school – full of great, dedicated professionals who are dutifully jumping through all the hoops, whilst still helping children learn and be nice to each other – I now often think…could I have done all this when I first started? In conversations with other Heads we ask ourselves how long could a teacher realistically work at a school before burning out? None of us have the answer but we know it’s probably below retirement age.

And this is the sad punchline to a joke that is becoming less and less funny. As the retirement age increases and the multitude of pressures on teachers continue to grow exponentially, it is impossible for teachers to be as good as the sum of their roles and responsibilities. We are, as a profession, working with our noses so close to the grindstone that the most sensible career advice I can give is forget teaching, go work in occupational health.

So enjoy your holiday (I know you’ve earned it), get ready for next term and let’s just hope that by the time we get back to school there haven’t been any new changes.

Everybody hurts

theprimaryhead3 Comments

 

I drove past a school* today that irked me. I won’t name it but the irk inducement came from the fact that they obviously felt a cut above your average state maintained primary school. I presumed this because in the middle of one of their banners, that were plastered all over their site in the manner of a low-end gin joint, was a statement that read:

‘We want to educate our children rather than train them to pass tests.’

I mean, excuse me but…who do you think you are? Actually, no, who do you think I am? Do you think I exist to hot-house children, unethically nurturing them on a diet of past papers, sucking any bit of life out of their curriculum because I am deluded about the nature of success and addicted to Raise-Online? Do you think I place more value on data than I do on the individuals that inhabit my school?

Is that the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’? I am blindly going about my business training children, whilst the enlightened are doing oh so much more? Am I and my teachers blinkered? Do we really only care about one thing? In all the year groups? (Even the ones that don’t administer SATs?) Does my school think of nothing else? Is that what you really think about us?

Of course you don’t…how could I think such a thing…I’m awfully mistaken…I’ve taken it out of context, got the wrong end of the stick, silly boy.

But, in the manner of a Daily Mail headline, you have put that assumption out there. And, by doing so, you discredit my school and every other state maintained school in the country who, actually, work just as hard as you to put in place a nurturing curriculum that hopes and dreams of a better future for our children. And, by making comments like that, you hurt us.

You hurt us because you place, in the backs of parents’ minds, a suspicion that we are not dedicated to their children. So every booster group, every additional support intervention brings with it a cross-wired perception of how we see our role. That hurts our credibility and, sadly, I can’t afford an advertising campaign to say otherwise. No, I have to use happy children, rates of progress, levels of achievement, ofsted and sometimes…SATs, in order to boost my public profile.

But perceptions like these cut deeper than a school’s public profile. It cuts into teachers’ professionalism. If anyone could listen to the conversations that my staff have about our children then they would understand the time, care, knowledge, understanding and spot-on personalisation of support that goes into planning lessons, additional support, booster groups and general quality of provision. Then the work of teachers would not be at risk and undermined by snipy comments and perceptions that we’re only in it for the end of year age related money shot. It would be valued and treasured and my teachers would be thanked, praised and acknowledged for their determination to do right by the children they teach.

Sadly, cynicism seems to be winning. People prefer to misjudge rather than to understand, criticise rather than praise and ultimately devalue a profession that is more important than any other, and one that I am proud to be part of. It is this that really hurts. It is this that makes teachers decide to pack it all in and who can blame them? They’re working harder than ever and yet everyone else outside of the profession seems to know better. And why? Because somewhere along the line the message about ‘why’ and ‘what’ we do, became blurred with the ‘how’ we are judged. People began to assume that a narrow-minded judgement became our motivation and that opened the gates to scepticism, meaning that we now have to over-justify our reasons for every little thing.

This is not the fault of non-state maintained schools and I have absolutely nothing against the quality of teaching and motivation behind any educational organisation (except free schools) and I wish any teacher all the luck in the world. It was just sad to see another educationalist feed the beast of negativity towards schools like mine. I’d like to think we were all better than that. Maybe we are, maybe I’m just paranoid and REM came on the radio at the wrong time, maybe I should apologise to the school for reading too much into their adverts…you can’t blame me, inference is a level 5 skill after all and as you know, I’m all about the SATs.

*not in my patch or local authority area, don’t worry chaps.