Author: theprimaryhead

Oh what a lovely war

theprimaryhead5 Comments

I read an article the other day about the final Hobbit film that is due to open this Christmas: ‘The Hobbit: The battle of the five armies film to end in 45 minute battle scene‘ screamed the headline. Can you imagine that? A great war between aloof elves, socially repressed ogres, single-minded orcs, sniping goblins and smug wizards. I imagine, sat in the cinema, it will be a never-ending stream of trolling. Now, I hate to be the one to break it to Mr Jackson, but 45 minutes of watching the same boring fight over and over again is nothing compared to what Twitter’s education community is capable of. We of course only have two armies: Progressives and Traditionalists. But, even so, that doesn’t stop them from battling continuously over hallowed yet uncommon ground. Aside from being hell-bent on knocking seven shades of pedagogy out of one another, each side is resolutely unforgiving of their opponent’s fighting methods.

I will now, dear reader, summarise the main differences between the progressive and traditionalist approaches to teaching. Actually, no I won’t, it’s far too boring. Look, just close your eyes and give your Twitter timeline a big old swipe…I guarantee you’ll land on a link to some blog that will explain it all. As the saying goes:

‘In the land of Twitter education, you’re ne’er more than 2 tweets away

From a progressive or traditional teacher, desperately having their say.’

I have often said that I don’t know what being a ‘progressive’ or a ‘traditional’ teacher actually means, and I’ll admit now that this is only half true. I do know the broad differences in ideology. Traditionalists are Victorian time travellers who know everything and believe that children should just shut-up, listen and graft silently until they bore a hole into their little wax slates. Progressives, meanwhile, mainly teach through the medium of dance, believe that there is no such thing as a single answer and that children can only work if playing in groups. The only characteristic these two types share is a fundamental belief that their opponents are singlehandedly ruining the education of this country.

In terms of who is winning the battle, it’s possible that the traditionalists are at the moment. We seem to be entering an age of educational austerity. I guess that comes from a few years of a Conservative government, one secretary of state’s worryingly self-absorbed obsession with reshaping the educational landscape to suit his own ego, performance related pay and Ofsted’s demand that progress is made within twenty minutes by every child. All of this encourages weak leaders to put pressure on teachers to produce ‘results’. In this climate, rote learning, sharp discipline methods and the testing of facts in order to prove capability kind of supports a traditionalist’s approach. And with the recent Sutton Trust research project that suggests even giving praise is a waste of bloody time, you could be forgiven for being a rather smug traditionalist at the moment. The mere thought that we could make a difference by allowing children to work together, by encouraging role-play beyond a drama lesson, by bringing empathy into learning, by making lessons ‘fun’ is sheer madness isn’t it, you risk averse robotic kill-joy?

But hey, that all sounds like I’m anti-traditionalist, and that is not the case. I have, for some time, been concerned that the public demand on schools has become too wide ranging. We are teachers. We teach children stuff and that’s where it should end. Society expecting us to do everything in terms of a child’s development is just not on. Parents expecting a teacher to design a personalised curriculum on the basis of their child’s interests-without a care for the other thirty children in the class or the national curriculum-is also just not on. It’s selfish and smacks of a middle-class sense of entitlement run amok. If children are unsure of school rules or how to be polite, it is the school’s job to give them higher expectations and sanction them when they fall below them – and if parents can’t understand that the school’s behaviour policy is in place for their child too, then schools should have the power to give the parents a detention as well as the kids! (See, not so progressive now am I?)

However, what always strikes me as odd and depressing, as I get engulfed by the hot air caused by a Twitter-edu-debate-blast-zone, is how rigid and at times blinkered some of these progressives and traditionalists are. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just a weak minded, woolly headed individual who doesn’t know his own mind. But, try as I might, I can’t nail my colours to the mast. I honestly couldn’t tell you which approach I favour because, as you have read, in my time I’ve been both a traditionalist and a progressive.

I’ve worked with all types of children in all types of settings and, as I flit between being a traditionalist and a progressive, I have come to realise that there is a third type of teacher that is better than both of them put together (literally). I am talking of course about the ‘subtle’ teacher.

Teaching is a subtle art and I am a subtle teacher. I am a Subtle-ist. By my Bing Dictionary definition this means that I am ‘intelligent, experienced, sensitive enough to make refined judgments and distinctions’. Therefore, I can appreciate the time or the context where a traditionalist approach is appropriate just as much as I can identify the right time and situation to deploy a more progressive mode of teaching. It is through deft deployment of these styles that allowed my pupils to make progress and, as a Head, allows me to run a school (full of bull-headed traditionalists and progressives) successfully. At the end of the day we are all educationalists, which means it is our job to educate the children in our care, which in turn means…we gots to do what works. And I’ve never known one approach work the same for everyone – and I seriously doubt you have either.

So, let’s leave the extended battles to the elves, wizards and talking eagles, and let’s start an underground movement of our own: La Résistance Subtle! Let’s leave the petty name calling and ‘my way or the highway’ nonsense behind and embrace all that is nuanced in education. Let’s agree that it’s ok to change teaching styles depending on what class you’ve got or what you’re teaching, or even what the weather is like (I’ll wager a traditionalist doesn’t let the fact that it’s windy outside get in the way of a maths test). We can do it. We just need to be open to adaptation and try to approach teaching from a subtle-ist’s perspective.

Who’s with me?

 

 

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Modern life is rubbish

theprimaryhead1 Comment

I’ll keep it brief: Modern Britain sucks.

I don’t mean that being here, actually living on this small island is bad, for the record, I quite like it – we have a national health service, the BBC, a good solid class system that allows me to feel socially awkward pretty much constantly, and some of the best cheeses known to man. No, living here, suits me down to the ground.

What I dislike about ‘modern Britain’ is that it’s now been appropriated by politicians and become a ‘thing’. Modern Britain has now, apparently, arrived and of course, schools have not noticed. While we’ve been busy teaching girls how to walk in a steady line whilst balancing a pile of books on their heads and developing boys’ aptitude for shimmying up chimneys, the world has moved on.

Modern Britain is totally new. It’s all shiny and fast and touchscreen. And that’s great and people want that. But they also kind of want traditional things, how things used to be – you know, cups of tea, starched shirts, McDonalds. Imagine Britain was like the Booker Prize and the winning book was a mash-up of Thomas Hardy and Irvine Welsh. Modern Britain is exactly like that. Classic, sweary, comfortable, edgy, shabby, chic.

Except…there’s more. According to facts there is also radicalisation, separatism and a poisoning of good old fashioned British values. I’m not sure what these British values are: imperialism, colonialism, Thatcherism? But in between the Old Britain and the New Britain is the Bad Britain. Close your eyes and think of Britain today: you’re probably getting an image of a tattooed Mary Berry piping salted caramel curry sauce on a Yorkshire pudding whilst sexting. That’s modern Britain, red in tooth and claw, and that last bit…that’s the bad bit.

This is the full hard core Britain that we, as educators, were just letting children blindly wander into. But now, thanks to Ofsted that is set to change. No longer can we just get on and try to survive in whatever sort of Britain we wake up to – now we must prepare children for a pre-defined modern Britain; the one that we apparently all want and have subconsciously agreed upon.

There’s just one problem…this idea of Modern Britain is a bit, well, naff. And I say that knowing that I’m discrediting my previous three paragraphs. That’s how sure I am that the people who decided, in the new Ofsted consultation, that schools should prepare pupils for life in modern Britain, hadn’t really thought it through. I mean I put a lot of thought into the Mary Berry bit (a little too long to be honest) and well, even though I reckon that’s the most accurate picture anyone has ever come up with to describe modern Britain, I wouldn’t want to hang my school’s whole curriculum on it – let alone yours!

But soon we’re going to be subjected to proving how we’re preparing children for someone’s idea of modern Britain. How is that going to work? Who is that someone? Why will their version of British values be relevant for my pupils or yours? And does anyone really think it’s going to work?

My suspicion is that this body of work will be reduced to box ticking. All over the country websites will change, ever so slightly, to make sure words like ‘modern’ and ‘British’ and ‘values’ are visible to impending Ofsted inspectors. Every school policy will be updated with identical incidental paragraphs promising that promoting British values is an integral part of school life. During the inspection Heads will do whatever the modern British values equivalent is of lighting a candle in assembly in order to pass it off as ‘collective worship’.

No school will actually sit down and decide for themselves what British values are and how they promote these in their school. And if they did, what would stop a rogue inspector saying ‘No, no, no, these are not British values…these are!’ It’s an inappropriate misappropriated mess.

I don’t doubt that the concept has come from a good place. But seriously…let’s be British about it and think about it sensibly. How about bringing back community cohesion? That was pretty good wasn’t it? Looking at your community, celebrating its strengths and challenging its weaknesses. Working out how you could give your children the best start in, not just modern Britain, but the modern world – an even more rapidly changing place.

Some might say, that schools have been doing this for years, even when community cohesion wasn’t considered cool anymore. Yes, a minority of schools may have failed some of their pupils by not safeguarding them effectively from the more sinister fractions of their community but their failings are lessons learned and taken forward by all of us. We don’t all need another knee-jerked bolted on initiative to put into action…we just need to keep our ears open in order to hear the winds of change because modern Britain doesn’t suck…it blows.

 

 

Hypocritical kiss

theprimaryhead10 Comments

Tristram Hunt

To be fair to Tristram, teaching really is a profession where we could do with a little more commitment. You only have to look at school staff car parks at 3:30pm up and down the land, empty and deserted, to know that. Walk into any staff room during lunch time and, as you listen to every adult within judging distance, giggling with glee at the prospect of being home in time for ‘Pointless’ whilst they book their seventh holiday of the year, it’s clear that any ‘moral calling’ to join a ‘noble profession’ is falling on deaf ears. Teachers are well known procrastinators, deliberately wasting their time and underperforming. If I had a free school meal for every time a teacher said to me during performance management ‘but I became a teacher for the holidays’ I’d be able to feed the juniors for free as well as the infants.

Governments have tried to address this before. Knowing full well that teaching encourages even the hardest working individual to become an opportunistic slothful slouch (the sort of person who avoids ‘professionalism’ like they would the wet footprints left behind by a child wearing a verruca sock), they tried to increase the teacher’s workload. But it doesn’t seem to matter how many initiatives you throw at them, teachers just keep on hiding in the shadows and getting away with it. You would have thought performance related pay, league tables, testing nonsense words, pupil premium, sports premium, SPAG tests, removing assessment systems and having to invent your own, constantly changing inspection frameworks, new curriculums…all these, you would have thought, would have had some impact. But no: teaching remains a sullied profession and Tristram has, quite rightly, had enough.

I mean what makes it worse is that it’s not just ‘those in the know’ who have noticed. Parents are beginning to wise up to the fact that teachers don’t know what they’re talking about. Luckily they can now do something about it. Due to the canniest political move since Blair told Brown ‘of course you can take over after five years’ and then mouthed ‘NOT’ whilst poor Gordon was distracted trying to add the 10% service charge to the bill, parents can have even more control over their children’s education by building free schools. There may only be a few of them, but they are the only schools where the right people are in charge with the right people in the classrooms – the more unqualified the better I say, as it makes it easier to do what the parents want if you haven’t got to view their requests through a lens of ‘knowledge’, ‘experience’ or ‘being an actual educator’. Spare a thought then for all the other parents, who have to live with the fact that their local authority school or academy chain is being run by people who consider weekends as some kind of entitlement.

Luckily, Tristram has a two point plan to change all of this. He will first make teachers take a ‘Hippocratic oath’ and he will then give them an actual compass. I could go into details here about why these two things are brilliant ideas, but I wouldn’t want to patronise you. It is a brilliant plan; anyone can see it: the oath will mean that teachers finally see that they are expected to work hard ‘educating’ and the compass will help them navigate their way to the toilets in a new build. There really is nothing more to add. Bravo.

It is so nice to be able to get behind someone who ‘gets us’ and sees the wood despite all the trees. Like a laser beam zoning in on James Bond’s balls, Hunt has teaching in his sights and knows how to sort it all out. He knows that the profession must elevate itself from the bargain basement expectations we currently have and soar like Icarus towards the light – and his two point plan will make sure we never get anywhere near the sun. Clever Tristram.

What better way to make us better than giving us an oath and a compass? I mean, you could argue that dismantling free schools, redefining assessment procedures so they are meaningful, cutting back on nonsense policies that distract us from teaching and learning, not dumping social issues onto our laps and expecting us to fix them/eradicate them with no more cash or time, creating an inspection system that isn’t driven through fear and inconsistency, respecting schools to make decisions that benefit the whole community rather than pandering to lone, loud voices, and generally valuing teachers for doing an incredibly complex job in an increasingly complex world, would also help restore teaching to its stature as a noble profession, but, like most of us teachers out there, maybe he’s afraid of hard work. Never mind, I’m sure the compass will work just as well.