Even as teachers conduct their biggest walk out since 1986, parents remain woefully uninformed about the real issues behind the strikes. Low pay, long hours and student behaviour are certainly factors – but no teacher expects to earn big bucks, for children to be angelic, or to knock off at 3.30pm every day. The issues facing teachers are complex and deep-seated and need to be discussed in much greater depth.
While the press only mentions “teachers’ rights” on the vanishingly rare occasion that teachers step up to defend them, the erosion of teachers’ rights continues unabated behind the scenes. Britain’s teachers are being directed beyond their contracts on a daily basis: losing their “protected” lunch breaks to meetings; taking on cover teaching outside their specialism; and being observed well beyond the three times a year recommended by the National Education Union.
In place of real change: a yoga class
Some colleagues and I once took these exact concerns to our headteacher, only to be told that the Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) was on the fence about whether to “recognise” the unions or not. The fence was very comfortable, apparently. In place of real change, we were offered a “staff wellbeing” yoga class. A nice idea, you might think, and yes, it would have been lovely – if we hadn’t been too busy doing unpaid overtime to attend. As an academy (like 80% of secondary schools and 40% of primary schools), it did not have to adhere to the national teachers’ working pay and conditions guidelines, or even to recognise the unions.
As teachers’ rights have deteriorated, their professional agency has also been undermined by increasingly prescriptive curricula, standardised testing and the pressures of league-tables and Ofsted reports. Teachers are continually called upon to respond to government/MAT reforms that seldom canvas their input – barely getting used to one system before they’re ditching all of last year’s paperwork and creating reams of new progress sheets and assessment grids.
Culture of judgement and surveillance
Meanwhile, micromanagement from a new, corporate brand of educational leaders is contributing to a culture of judgement and surveillance. Teachers no longer choose what to teach, how to teach it, how often to set homework or how to do their marking: everything is governed by school/MAT/national policy and monitored via lesson observations and random inspections of their students’ work.
A brilliant teacher I know got into trouble because she failed to provide written feedback on every single page of her students’ art portfolios as per school policy; another went through a humiliating disciplinary procedure for not displaying differentiated learning objectives at the start of every lesson. Both left teaching shortly after.
Photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash
It is no secret that teaching involves a lot of paperwork, but few really understand the farcical nature of the progress-tracking that teachers are subjected to. Most parents don’t know that GCSE target grades are often based on students’ achievements in literacy and numeracy five years earlier – even for completely different subjects such as Art and Drama. Students with realistic target grades are therefore something of an anomaly; living proof that ‘even a stopped clock is right twice a day’. The rest are either wildly under- or overestimated (demoralising either way), and their teachers consigned to spend their evenings filling in endless rows of utterly meaningless progress data.
Life inside ‘an enormous pressure cooker’
Teaching in schools is like working in an enormous pressure-cooker: steam whistling in crescendo, lid about to come flying off at any moment. The pressure from below looms large in the public imagination. If you tell people you’re a teacher, the reaction is always ‘Wow – you’re brave’. We ARE brave – but it’s not mainly about the kids.
Of course, it’s true: children can be an absolute nightmare. They can – even while showing minimal application in their studies – come up with genius, intuitive, creative ways to torment their teachers. I’ve had both chairs and chicken nuggets thrown at me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. In the end, the hilarity, creativity and joy of working with young people massively outweighs the grief.
Ultimately, pressure from below is nothing like as oppressive as the pressure from above (government/ MAT/senior management/middle management) or from the side (parents). Because here’s the thing: while you’re dealing with 30 plus kids at a time, your inbox is choking up with urgent demands from parents and managers, as though you were just hanging out behind your desk with no more than a steaming latte for company. Once the teaching day is done you finally sit down (still sans latte) to another entire job: replying to emails, marking homework, attending meetings, and dealing with the aforementioned pointless paperwork.
Following 13 years of Tory underfunding, class sizes are bigger than ever, classroom resources are scarcer than ever, and teaching assistants are verging on extinction. Lack of funding – along with the worst recruitment crisis since the Second World War – mostly shows up in everyone having far too much work because there aren’t enough people to do it all. In theory, for example, teachers aren’t supposed to do non-specialist admin tasks; in practice, no teacher I’ve met would dream of taking their photocopying to the school’s admin team, who are invariably run ragged too.
Another impact of under-funding is teachers being made to teach outside of their specialism. I trained to teach one subject, taught two at my first school and four at my second. I enjoyed the variety, but it meant racing between several departments, abiding by several sets of department paperwork, and having to field concerns from parents about my (very real) lack of qualifications to teach French. This is even worse for the students, whose one shot at learning is now carried out by a carousel of non-specialists and supply teachers.
With 77% of Britain’s teachers reporting mental health problems linked to work and 44% planning to quit in the next five years, it’s high time we started listening to teachers – about all of the things making their jobs unsustainable. Only then can we begin to turn things around, for them and for the millions of young people whose futures are hanging in the balance.
Following strike action on 15 and 16 March, the NEU entered talks with the government on 17 March.
- Hannah’s upcoming book can be found on her website: www.teacherssurvivalhandbook.com
