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I, teacher

theprimaryhead11 Comments
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Whatever doesn’t get you sacked…only makes you stronger.

There may be some (many) NQTs out there who found the Autumn terms tough. Even the most naturally gifted teacher or bright-eyed bushy-tailed young Buck can find the reality of being an actual full time teacher really hard. That’s partly because it is. Teaching is an incredibly hard job and it’s only in your first proper term that you realise how sheltered you were from the day-in day-out pressures of the job whilst you were training. But it’s also because you haven’t been doing it for that long. So before you spend the final night of your holidays not sleeping as you worry about whether you will be able to jump back onto the merry-go-round or worry that you are just not cut out for this profession read this. Here I dig deep into my memory archives and share with you some of the most incompetent parts of my NQT year. Why? Because I guarantee you have not done anything this bad and it turned out alright for me so you will be fine.

When I graduated and became a teacher they had literally just introduced those English, Maths and ICT tests you had to do in order to get your qualified teaching status. Now as I am not a great auditory learner I didn’t quite get the full message during the lecture where they explained it. All I came away from it thinking was: ‘I’ve got three years to do them’.

So I happily applied for a job, got the interview and got the job. I taught happily for about two months before the Head called me into her office where the Chair of Governors was also waiting. She had received a call from the council saying that there was an unqualified teacher employed as a qualified teacher working in the school. Now, it was a small school so she only had four people to really choose from: the deputy, the SENCO, the Early Years leader and the NQT (I’m pretty sure I was the only one she bothered bringing into her office). What she now had to do was to decide whether I was committing fraud on purpose or just an idiot. Thankfully it didn’t take me too long to convince them of the latter but it was a rather intense meeting where I was facing the very real possibility of losing my job. I apologised, had my pay docked until I had paid back the difference to the local authority and promptly took the tests (and passed). I carried on teaching there for four years.

After I was a proper qualified teacher (by then I even had the certificate to prove it) I settled into the rhythms of teaching. One morning I woke up and I looked up at my skylight and thought: ’Gosh, it’s incredibly light out there.’ At that exact moment I heard the flat buzzer go off – who on earth could that be so early? I stumbled out of bed to answer the buzzer and as I opened my bedroom door I saw that my flatmate had beaten me to it. The voice at the other end was asking if I was in, my flatmate replied that of course I wasn’t in because I was at work….no I wasn’t the voice replied. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:50am. By this point I was beginning to work out why it was so light in my bedroom and the voice was explaining to my house mate that she was the Deputy Head, I wasn’t in work so if I was in fact here I should put some trousers on and meet her downstairs quickly.

Again I had to explain to my Head that I was simply an idiot who had slept through his alarm. I practically had to give a blood test and urine test to prove to everyone else that I wasn’t hung-over. They amusingly presented me with an alarm clock the next day and I had to bribe my class with watching a video on Friday afternoon if they vowed not to tell their parents. I carried on teaching there for four years.

I took my class to a local bookshop (for some reason? I actually can’t remember-perhaps an author was there). I had asked one of the parents to come with us and it was she who informed me on the way back that some of the children had taken some gift cards from the store. I asked them to empty their pockets and after I had counted them all up I told the children that collectively they had stolen £450 from the store. I hadn’t done a proper telling off before so I went to town on them. There were tears, I may have mentioned criminal records and I got the parents in and demanded that the children write apology letters to the manager. Afterwards, I inspected the gift cards and saw that they weren’t actually vouchers but promo cards – never mind I thought trying to sound convincing, in principle they stole and I was right to tell them off. I rang the store manager who didn’t seem to mind saying that they get taken all the time and are worthless and there was no need for me to return them. Finally my Head called me in as the parent volunteer had spoken to her and raised the point that I hadn’t sent out any letters about the trip and therefore hadn’t got any parent’s permission. ‘I know it’s a local visit,’ she said, ‘But you still have to tell the parents you’re taking their child on a bloody trip!’ I carried on teaching there for four years.

So there are just three appalling examples of my ineptness during my first year of teaching – I haven’t even mentioned my teaching which when I look back now was pretty appalling. I spent my first year as a teacher caught between feeling elated that I was doing this job followed by daily waves of panic, thinking I was out of my depth. Why have I written this?  Because if there are any new or newish teachers out there who are feeling out of their depth or worried that they have made mistakes that will haunt them forever; you can now relax because you’re not THIS much of an idiot. So get a good night’s sleep and take on Term 3 with confidence and gusto; just for goodness sake…set you alarm.

How many pupils does it take to get inadequate?

theprimaryhead2 Comments

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I’ve just had an HMI visit. It wasn’t an official 6 weeks after Ofsted visit; it was one out of the three support visits that any requires improvement school is entitled to before the next full inspection.

I dictated the day and had telephone conversations and emails with my inspector who just asked me to make sure that the day was useful to me. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing that I see will trigger an inspection’ (except safeguarding issues such as, oh I don’t know, a child leaving your premises and being missing for an hour) ‘and nothing that I recommend needs to be obeyed-it’s just some extra help’.

Now, I could have sent him to areas of the school that I know we’ve improved with the aim of getting some validation. But in all seriousness: why waste an opportunity! No, I welcome the challenge and advice. Plus I genuinely, one hundred percent respect this particular inspector- he is painfully astute at times and his approach is purely supportive to the point that I  may be developing a serious man-crush.

It was a tough old day. He did see some ropey lessons and worse he saw them with me meaning I had to say it as I saw it (or at least how I knew he saw it) in order to make sure he didn’t back out of his agreement not to trigger a full section 5. But by the end of the day he was left assured that we were ‘on the right track’.

Lesson observations: they got more abuse on twitter than Michael Gove at an NUT rally. The main grudge seems to be: don’t judge me as a teacher based on one lesson – and if you’re talking purely ofsted that one lesson becomes 20 minutes of a lesson. I understand the frustrations felt by teachers and have written about it before with the main thrust of my argument being a good SLT should not judge the quality of teaching on an observation but through a variety of evidence.

Take my handsome challenging HMI inspector. He saw lessons that could be judged inadequate but after looking at books and planning and talking to my middle leaders he was satisfied that the lesson did not reflect the day to day quality of teaching. So I was pleased because overall he was satisfied that my claims of school improvement were not just hot air and he was pleased because I was able to come out and say a lesson was inadequate.

Inadequate. It is such a horribly loaded word that has no supporting features whatsoever. When uttered all it does is break people. But we are all going to have to grit our teeth and accept the fact that it is part of the fabric of school improvement. It hurts – no, in fact it stings. It smarts more than the public humiliation of defecating into your swimming trunks after belly-flopping off the top diving board (er…I imagine). And the immediate response is denial or trying to nonchalantly shrug it off as unimportant but you can’t accept the fact that everyone can see poo dripping down your leg as you get out of the pool someone believes that you just taught really badly.

20 minutes. That really gets on people’s nerves. Can you really judge a lesson to be inadequate after only 20 minutes? Look at it from a different perspective: in 20 minutes worth of a lesson, learning didn’t occur. Does that still sound harsh? Probably. Well get a load of this: it may be because in 20 minutes worth of lesson, learning didn’t occur for some pupils. What? I know. It’s tough. But I watched three children on the carpet (subtly) do nothing for ten minutes. They didn’t engage, they didn’t really answer any questions and then when they went off to do their work they didn’t really know what to do. I looked in their book and they were doing the same work as everyone else. Plus, the teacher didn’t go near them-they stayed with the SEN group-it’s as if those three children had gone unnoticed under the radar. But it’s only three pupils! How many pupils does it take to get inadequate? (In other words: how low are your expectations?)

In 20 minutes, that will get you an inadequate. Why? Not because three children in 20 minutes didn’t make progress at a significant rate; but because the teacher did nothing about it. Now, this is why a lesson observation should only be part of the process. Planning over time, work in books over time might show great learning over time for those pupils and all the others. If it does: great you are a good+ teacher. However, if planning over time shows you don’t cater for those pupils’ needs, if work in books show no progress or clear differentiation and assessment is either static or inaccurate then what I saw in those 20 minutes starts to take on more serious connotations.

As a school leader I try really, really hard to make sure my staff understand that lesson observations offer a snapshot: give me a way in. If they tally with planning, work in books, assessments and progress then it gives me an overall assessment of the value for money of your teaching over time. If it doesn’t tally (lesson was awful:  everything else fine; lesson was great: everything else ain’t) then it gives me somewhere to start supporting you. HMI saw that this was the case and left saying, ok I saw some not great stuff in lessons but I think those lessons were anomalies and all other evidence suggests that teaching and achievement is improving.

However this still leaves us with a conundrum: could a school get ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ if ofsted only saw requires improvement or inadequate lessons? Truly good and better schools will have all the other evidence to suggest that they are indeed good or better. And even the best teachers can mess up a lesson or even lessons (because remember, how many pupils have to not make progress to form a poor judgement). It is also possible (in terms of probability) that in one school at one given point in time, every teacher in the school will deliver inadequate lessons (one or more pupils not making visible progress in a twenty minutes time frame) throughout the day. But if EVERYTHING else indicates the contrary, will ofsted’s overall judgement overrule this fact? Will we ever read an outstanding ofsted report that reads: ‘the inspectors observed 15 lessons over one day and all were judged to be inadequate: the quality of teaching and achievement in this school is outstanding’?

I don’t know..but it sounds like a bloody good challenge!

I am not an elephant….I’m a primary school headteacher!

theprimaryhead9 Comments

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I thought I would stand up and be counted on behalf of all primary educators out there. I hope lots of you have read @michaelt1979’s interesting post on why us primary folks don’t get as much tweet action as our secondary counter-parts. It was suggested that it could be because we don’t engage in the big issues as much as our older siblings; kind of like when the grown-ups are at the big table talking about important things like politics, money and the season finale of breaking bad whilst the kids are lumped on a smaller table a few feet away eating with their fingers and shouting about twerking, sexting and the best place to buy pure Blue Sky.

On twitter you often can’t move for links to dense (as in compact not as in thick) blog posts about pedagogy, skills vs knowlegde, student cognitive processes, learning styles, teaching styles, Ofsted framework updates, behaviour issues and occasionally posts about Bloom’s taxidermy (or some such). Each link is normally followed by even more dense (not always as in compact) arguments that go on for so long I can’t help thinking that Twitter will at some point run out.

And it has to be said that it is often secondary folks who are taking part. Why is that? Are primary people not interested? Are we too busy? Do we not know what they’re talking about? Are the issues not appropriate for primary? If this is the case then maybe we should start differentiating twitter. The secondary swines can follow the ‘blue’ timelines about education reforms and we’ll follow the ‘green’ lines about funny things children say on the way to assembly and the end of season twist in Peppa Pig.

Or maybe we should step up to the plate, set the straw man on fire and engage positively with the issues of the day. Thankfully @michaelt1979 gave us some pointers so I will now try to answer each of his questions in no more than one sentence. (Something a few secondary colleagues could try? #justsaying #onlyjoking #reallydon’twanttostartatwitterwartodayihaveabigcurrytomakelater)

Ok, here we go!

Will ‘scaled scores’ provide useful information at end-of-key-stage tests?

Well it’s always good to have some sort of comparison on local and national levels in order to support schools with their self-evaluation but I wouldn’t think parents would be that fussed and I suspect the powers that be will place too much emphasis on them-oh well.

 How will we assess English and Maths once levels are scrapped?

I think now could be the time to finally get an assessment process that is consistent from Early Years all the way to the top so it’s ‘emerging, expected, exceeding’ end of year expectation statements for me.

Is primary schooling becoming all core and no breadth?

Core is really important and it always has been but give schools and teachers creativity when developing their own curriculum and there’s no reason why we still can’t have a ‘broad and balanced’ curriculum that is right for 21st century learners.

Does the new National Curriculum necessarily mean more rote teaching & learning?

No-not if school leaders work hard  and make sure teachers are supported in teaching strategies that will ensure standards improve.

Will the new grammar requirements in the National Curriculum raise standards of reading/writing?

Probably a bit if we’re teaching children how to read and write better ‘technically’ but don’t believe the hype about standards improving when all we’re using is test results.

Do primary teachers have the subject knowledge needed for the new National Curriculum?

If by subject knowledge you  mean being able to teach skills effectively for every subject then we probably could do better; if you mean do they know all the historical facts about the UK since time began that no, they don’t: no one does.

What does it mean to be “secondary ready”, as the DfE suggests we should be aiming for?

It means that pupils are ready to engage in a Year 7 curriculum and have developed skills such as resilience, independence, responsibility in order to cope in a massively different learning environment .

Is the current level 4b a viable expectation for 85% of students?

No because levels are going.

How is the newly-enhanced Pupil Premium going to have an impact in primary?

It gives me more headaches in terms of tracking but hasn’t really impacted upon supporting pupils as we always do whatever we can to support pupils who need it .

How can we use the new sports/PE funding effectively?

Develop partnerships for long term coaching opportunities at a local level and provide access to quality sporting equipment.

How can research findings about feedback/knowledge/learning be applied in primary classrooms?

If there is research that would support a particular area of development in a school then the person/people responsible for improving it should find ways of applying it and measuring on a small scale and then develop it across the school.

What impact are small cohorts or small sub-groups having on Ofsted inspection outcomes?

Small cohorts and sub-groups are always going to be a problem – the solution is to know the ‘story’ of every pupil in that group and evidence everything you have done to increase their chances.

Are stand-alone primary academies viable?

I don’t know.

What is the professional view on baseline assessments for children on entry to YR?

If we’re going to develop consistency in the method of assessing pupils starting in Reception then why not but if it’s going to be detached let’s not bother.

What are the issues related to the proposed free school meals programme for infants?

Huge…I don’t even know how I can get every infant in one hall eating a hot lunch without staggering lunchtime over three hours: I’d rather use the money to provide a free breakfast.

What does constitute effective use of teaching assistants?

TAs who play a part in assessing the pupils they work with alongside the teachers and also help set up IEPs and are held accountable to their progress: that way they will make sure that whatever they do is effective.

And I’m done. I did it. I managed to drag myself away from planning my assembly to answer the big questions of the day. Have I managed to show that primary professionals can engage with the best of them or have I shown the world exactly why I work in primary education? Who knows but at least I tried and in my school that means that I get a sticker!