Reason to be a [child centred] teacher

Reasons to be a teacher, and a child-centred one at that.

I was reading some people’s accounts about school days being the worst days of their lives. Most of them were mine too.

I knew I wanted to be a teacher from the age of 5 or 6. The teacher asked us to draw what we wanted to do when we grew up. I wanted to be a teacher but 1. I thought the teacher would laugh at me if I told her and 2. all the other girls wanted to be nurses, so I drew a nurse. But I remember knowing I wanted to be a teacher. 

Because of my father’s rather itinerant work habits, I went to 5 different primary schools and 2 different high schools (in 4 different counties, 3 villages and 2 towns) and thus I was always the outsider, and publicly humiliated and bullied by staff and pupils at all of the primary schools, and had a hard time at the high schools. 

Aged 4 or 5 in Luton, I had to stand by the classroom sink possibly in a waste basket (but I might be mixing Luton up with the Frampton). This was for finding a marble by the sink and putting it on my desk, then denying it publicly. I had only been in the school a few months, didn’t know this counted as theft, but the teacher’s thunderous voice let me know it was not a good thing.

In Frampton-on-Severn I was slapped across the face (aged 5 or 6) by Elizabeth, because I got to the toilet first, and refused to get off let her wee before me. As if that wasn't bad enough, when we all got back into school, I tried to go and wash my hands, but was then publicly singled out to wash my hands on my own (mother and teacher had different ideas about hygiene!). But the humiliation was too awful and I never washed my hands again at school.

In Whitminster, the next village school, I was so upset one day by leaving my satchel at school, that my mum and I cycled back over the canal, she with my baby brother on her bike. There was no one in the open school when we arrived, and then we saw the satchel hanging up in the headteacher’s office. Next day the headteacher threatened me (aged 7 ) with the cane. He said he would “tan my hide” if I went into his room again. Again I had no idea what I had done wrong. Luckily we only stayed in Whitminster for a few months before the next upheaval.

We moved to Tanners Green in Wythall, Worcestershire, and I went to Silver Street School in Drake’s Cross. I think it was because I was tall for my age they accidentally put me in the wrong class! However after being there a few months I came 17th in some exams I don’t recall taking, and was made to stand in hall/on the stage with all the kids who had come first, second and third in their classes. I recall being mystified, and wondering what the effect on my relationship with the class would be. But I needed have worried. They had spotted how old I was by the beginning of the next school year and then I had a new set of friends to make, but I was back with Mrs Kidger. 

I think it was when I was with the older kids that The Great Trauma began. There was to be a a concert. We had to sing and some people would have starring roles. I used to go to the “ballet” class in Frampton-on-Severn and was well used to being on a stage, but mostly as an elf. When I was six I went to the panto in Stroud with the Brownies and sang all of O Little Town of Bethelemen, even though they said thankyou after the first verse. I had tasted stardom and was ready for more. I loved it - the singing, the stage, the applause. I wanted to be a musician, and asked for piano lessons (the mother had her Pohlman in the house, a wedding present from her father).

Back to Silver Street School. We were rehearsing For the concert. I was ready for the starring role and hoping be king or queen. When Mrs Kidger tapped me on the shoulder and then tapped Dermot Mackie on the shoulder, and one other boy, I thought great, I don’t need to sing with the rest of the class, I am going to have a main part.

After the concert rehearsal finished Mrs K gathered us three together and told us we were singing out of tune, and so we were not be in the show. Went home in floods, mother came to school next day, confessed cheerfully to whoever that she couldn’t sing in tune either, and asked if couldn’t I mime. I mimed, trying to keep the floods back - as I mimed from then on for the next 21 years. Still do quite often. Mimed in assemblies, at weddings, in folk clubs, singing lessons. (I was having piano lessons in Kings Norton at the time, and had been dreaming of being a rock and roll star, but actually the piano teacher terrified me. I never said a word. I just laid the florin down at the top end of the piano, and played every dot in front of me, did whatever she told me.

In September I sat at the front next to Susan, and in front of Roger and Yvonne. I was to discover that we were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the class, and seating us like this also mystified me. Was she preparing us for high school? Still I Loved living in the countryside and Yvonne’s parents had a farm, and goat you could tie your scooter to. 

The following year I finally moved up a school year and met Mr Parker. I blossomed. He gave me all sorts of extra things to do and he would talk to me differently, and when my dad got a job in Leeds and he only came back at the weekends, Mr Parker let me learn a verse a week from The Funeral of St John Moore after Corunna in order to recite it to my dad when he got home and Mr Parker got me to recite it to the class beforehand. (Don’t ask why I chose that poem. I just found it in a book, liked the feel of the words and probably the rhythms of the words). 

Mrs Kidger and her class hadn’t finished with me. There were three girls who took it upon themselves to barge me and my friends in the playground, and then one day they filled all our pockets full of rubbish; in revenge I wrote pig pag and pog and three little scraps of paper and put one in each of the girls pocket. They told Mrs Kidger and she called for me and told me off. I was terrified, and in vain told her they started it. . I couldn’t see the fairness of this, again quite mystified.

But she even trumped herself with some proper teacher cruelty in that last week. I was in Mr Parker’s class full time now but the girls did knitting with her once a week and I was making a turquoise and coral striped hot water bottle cover for my dad. However it wasn’t finished, and in order to take it to Leeds, I had to bring some money in. I don’t know why I didn’t bring any money in. Mrs K summonsed me, and publicly handed the knitting over to the bully girls. I left for Leeds. Mr Parker asked if he could keep my composition book, promising to send it on [which he did]. And he and also the headteacher, Mr Matthews, then corresponded with me for two or three years - they were both 60 and retired the year after I left. Mr Parker wrote he thought we had another George Elliott in our midst. It was only years later rereading his letter that I knew what kid of a man this George was, but I already knew it was a compliment. that he had faith in me, and cared. 

At Harehills County Primary I brought the house down upon myself with the southern accent. It took my brother 3 weeks to shorten all his vowels. For some reason, I suppose bloodymindedness I kept my southern drawl for decades.

I was white, everyone so far in my schools was white, but I had curiously enough been brought up anti-racist by by dad. He was Welsh, crossed Uffa’s Dyke (as they say), and shelved his Welsh accent in his mid teens. One story he told us was that he had been with a group of colleagues, shortlisting candidates for interview, and the boss man said oh we can’t have him - he’s a Taff. Later my dad told us how when he was giving a lift to a hitch hiker once, and the hiker started making racist comments about black people ( don’t think we got the details, but on the lines of Enoch Powell I imagine). My dad stopped his car at the next roundabout, gave him a lecture and chucked him out. 

I remember knowing, but without knowing properly that Miss Fielding was a racist. She was horrible to me, but at least I didn’t get the ruler. And I knew, without knowing why I knew she was picking on Martin Goldman cos he was Jewish. I was traumatised watching her give him the ruler (not seen corporal punishment before). 

Two things from my year and a half at Harehills. Alison Phelps-Jones was top of the class and teacher’s favourite. Being clever was not Alison’s fault, nor was her being favourite. By now I was comfortable with having that position and was setting about proving my worth. We had a spelling test. Miss Fielding said ‘tongue’; I thought she said ‘ton’. 19 out of 20! What! I raised my hand, then her approached her on her plinth. ‘Very well then, spell it now!’ Very flustered at her irritation I of course misspelt it. There, she said, you wouldn’t have got it anyway. Distraught at the injustice I resumed my place, still second to Alison PJ. Later that term, I was now sitting at the back of the class and howling “I want my mummy” to the great amusement of my classmates.

But worse was to come. I had by now got a friend. She was Dorothy Padgett; she lived in Bayswater Grove and we used to bunk off after being marched along to St Aidans Church Hall, Roundhay Road for our school dinners. Dorothy had lost her mother, and her 16 year old sister had stepped up. School grassed us up and my parents forbade me to see Dorothy. I thought it was cos she lived in a back-to-back and was poor, but I don’t know why I thought that. At first we lived in a flat on Wetherby Road, but we had a social ladder to climb, which sadly included private education.

The Greater Humiliation was that entrance exam to Leeds Girls High. I remember taking my 11+, sitting in the school's big Victorian hall rubbing my squeaky new shoes together, half casually wondering what we there. It was really really boring. But my parents thought I could don better than Roundhay School (near to where we lived, and crucially where my classmates and neighbours would all be going).

I got through. I don’t know how Miss Fielding found out. I didn’t think she was interested in me. She made me stand at the front of the class and then she made them all applaud me. 

After I was the poor kid at Leeds Girls High School and then the posh kid at Allerton Grange Sixth Form.

When I did my PGSE and the started teaching at Foxwood in Leeds (1980) I wanted no one to go through what I had done, and set about being the most child-centred teacher there could be. Did courses, examined my own teaching styles, listened to the students, and regularly took aprt in residentials, often also dragging my primary age daughter up and down Pen-y-Ghent. And also met up with Charlotte Emery and together we took the world on. And many other amazing teachers. And hundreds of amazing students, some of whom I am still friends with.

So Foxwood School gave me the best days of my life, but it was as a teacher.

A counsellor in every school would be a start!

This is a guest blog from Dizzy Bee: So this is what I say to all the feckers bleeting on about the mental wellbeing of kids and how schools, government and unions have let them down:

The mental health of our children and the concerns for many of our children living lives in abject poverty and in abusive or neglectful households, is not the responsibility of schools and teachers. Teachers, support staff etc are a welcome respite to all this, but ultimately it’s not their job to deal with these particular issues. 

Of course, all the above are extremely important and need urgent attention. And if the government cared that much they would fund schools properly, there would be counsellors on site, there would be space and places in schools staffed by trained professionals, there would be places and spaces to feed and clothe them, there would be an emergency sanctuary and safe place for women fleeing violence, there would be dedicated professionals running workshops for young dads, old dads, mothers returning to work etc etc etc. 

Cuts, cuts cuts, cuts, mean that there is a limited support network for families that live in poverty, a poverty created by an unjust capitalist system that has marginalised so many people they don't even care why or how they are there. or if (and of course there are many) they do there is nowhere to go, no one to turn to... Universal credit? Laughable. 

What schools have become is a space for some children who live in these awful situations, and I don't know one teacher who does not care. But they (we) are teachers, educators and support staff. we are not social workers, psychologists or family support workers. They exist but they are few and far between. well in a school setting anyway, as a permanent fixture. even a school nurse has gone (the nit nurse we called mine!). A handful of family support workers stretch over many schools.

So please STOP claiming you care about the welfare of our children’s mental health until you properly invest in it. And stop piling expectation after expectation on to teachers and non-teaching staff to cover the role of all the above. They do it anyway and that should be just a bonus to the children, the hard-working dedication of teachers and support staff, not actually in the job description and not necessarily taught at teacher school [PGCE]! 

The strange case of a primary school teacher who is filled with dread of SATs being Scrapped

Letter sent to the Guardian 19 April 2019 for their consideration:

The article in the Guardian of 18 April (“I am a primary school teacher and Corbyn’s plan to scrap SATs fills me with dread”) makes me wonder whether the writer is indeed a teacher. If Solomon K is for real, then he is, in my opinion, in the wrong job. 

The article is wrong on so many counts, and they need addressing. Here are just some:

1. The title. It is not “Corbyn’s Plan”. He is responding to the wishes of thousands and thousands of parents, grandparents, children, teachers, school support workers, headteachers, mental health workers, and school governors.
2. Relying on teachers’ assessments would leave “our most vulnerable children at the mercy of notoriously unreliable judgments”. This is as much insulting as it is quite inaccurate. Teachers make judgments on a daily, hourly even, basis, and they act on them. And is an external examiner going to know better what inferences to draw from any given situation than the person who cares for a child every day?
3. The “unlucky ones have their work moderated by the local authority”. In what way is a local authority less competent, and evidently so much less competent than a central authority?
4. “SATs contribute far less to teacher workload and stress than teacher assessment.” . What are the after-school booster sessions all about then, what’s it like when you know that music has been cancelled, sometimes for the week, sometimes for the year? And you know that music would actually be better at developing cognitive skills than drilling and redrilling - and when Music and all the Arts actually, does so much more as well. 
5. “No one can be creative in a subject they haven’t mastered. Creativity depends on a secure foundation of knowledge”. This shows a deep misunderstanding of the concept of creativity. See Ken Robinson’s Ted talk for an explanation.
6. “Thousands of terrible, terrible teachers” He has been “personally in far too many bad schools. . “ On this insulting, almost libellous and unsubstantiated statement alone, I suggest that the Guardian should have steered clear of taking this person seriously, and using him as their Devil’s Advocate. 

Victoria Jaquiss, Leeds

(Peripatetic teacher, ex-school-based teacher, NEU representative, co-author of “Addressing SEND in the Curriculum: Music”, re-published Routledge 2018)

Spelling v Out of Tuneness SWYP with txtspk

SWYP with txtspk

Spelling v Out of Tuneness

This is in response to a TES article October 2015.

As a seven-year old aspiring musician I was told by my class teacher that I was singing out of tune, and that, far from playing the Duchess at the summer concert, I was now not even allowed to be in it. Me, Dermott Mackie [his name sticks in my head after all these years] and one other boy – all out.

Devastated, crushed beyond belief, by being denied this form of expression, and excluded from the party, I continued mechanically with piano lessons for another 8 years, but, for creative expression and self-belief I turned to English – language and literature.

My next form teacher at Silver Street Primary, Drakes Cross, nr Birmingham was Mr Parker; he said I could be the next George Elliott. I had no idea who he [!] was, but I knew this a compliment. I blossomed under his care, and st about learning by heart all of The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. [“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note . . “] which he made me recite , one verse at a time every Friday morning, to  the rest of the class; moreover he obviously got the class to listen to me.

We, as a family, suddenly moved from the countryside in the Midlands to inner-city Leeds before I got to Verse Five. I never did learn any more of how Sir John was laid to rest, but I did correspond with Mr Parker for a couple of years after that.

I devoted a couple of decades to being good at English, one of them as an English teacher. I was a naturally good speller, and am still easily upset at “seperate” and “definate” and other such abominations. Initially I fell for the old justification that correct spelling would help in some way with understanding and derivation [had spent four very happy years studying Latin]. But as an English teacher at Foxwood School, I watched too many children struggling with spelling, and as a mother, suffered alongside Daisy as she experienced her dyslexia.

Doing Languages at Uni I contemplated the great consonants shifts, read about the standardisation of the English spelling. Studying other foreign languages, generally phonetic, I realised that English spelling wasn't scientific law of nature, but a person-made barrier to communication.

A happy and rather wonderful accident occasioned my rebirth as a music teacher, and I was so lucky to have this second chance. But I still loved words and literature, and I still cared.

Words on the page are really only spoken words written down, just as musical notation is only a way to know, help remember or learn the sounds. 

Daisy & Alice at Leeds Corn Exchange

When I, so surprisingly,  re-entered the world of music; trained myself to teach music, I met loads of people who couldn’t handle out-of-tuneness, especially on my soon-to-be new chosen instrument – steelpans. And now after a decade or so, I can’t handle it either. However, I still can’t stand misspelt words but I know it’s almost an affectation. And the more I engage with textspeak the more liberated I feel.

The moral of this story is several. Here’s two:

1. No child should ever have their musical future destroyed by being out of tune early on.

2. "Correct" spelling is not important. Full stop. No child should be denied their academic future because of dyslexia or anything of that sort. [Daisy went on to get her degree twenty years after she left school, where she had been rubbished by snobbish academia].

'There has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession'

I, and many others loved this letter. As they say, He is only saying what others are thinking.

       but don't have the courage.

'There has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession' - one primary head's open letter to his MP

Colin Harris

8th October 2015 at 17:40

 

This week, Colin Harris, headteacher at Warren Park Primary School in Havant, Hampshire, received a letter from his local MP offering to visit the school. Mr Harris wrote the open letter below in response.

Dear Sir,
Thank you for your letter dated 2 October offering to visit Warren Park Primary School.
Unfortunately, I have real reservations about such a visit on several levels.
Under the coalition government and ongoing to the present time, there has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession. I have worked for and supported this profession for the last 37 years in what I hope is considered to be a successful way.
Under Mr Gove [the previous education secretary, Michael Gove], we saw the rise of divisive policies which ensured we created true isolation for teaching. These policies have led to thousands of teachers wanting to leave teaching with little hope of replacing either their number or their quality and experience.
My views on academies, free schools, lack of funding, assessment, Ofsted, pay rises, curriculum reform and the demise of local authorities will, of course, be different to yours. However, does it really matter? We have no forum to actually get people to listen to us, as we are now a true political football to be knocked around for the pleasure of both the media and the government at the expense of the future of our children.
I for one am fed up with it and so thank you for showing an interest, but I have to decline the visit until such time as the government really and truly cares about the future of education.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Harris,
Headteacher

The Platitudinous One let loose on Any Questions

This is the letter that I wrote to Any Answers, but forgot to send:

Your panel appeared to know very little about the mechanics of education, and the disaster that academisation has brought. It is not a freedom for educational innovation. It is an open invitation for business and rich people to meddle in something that they have have no qualifications or professional knowledge of.

 And the act of giving life to a child does not make a parent an educational specialist.  Parents are partial, and they are biased, and what is good for one child may not! In fact is unlikely to  suit another. 

Nick Gibb talked at length about nothing at all. It was one platitude after another. He judged schools in abstract terms with these stupid Ofsted labels. But schools are full of children, individuals whose role in life seems only to be part of a number of students who achieve an arbitrary academic goal. 

Children are delicate vulnerable sentient beings who need a good listening to before anyone inputs anything. 

And London schools improved because of the London challenge. Inventing "academies" was, with help from crony, Adonis, Tony Blair's second crime. They have never, per se, improved anyone's life chances. They make some rich people even richer. 

How PFI New-Builds Drain the funds from our School System

When the late unlamented Education Leeds began its cruel and pointless destruction of Leeds schools, I thought, Blimey, have they got shares in construction companies? But I dismissed the thought because, in my naivety, I didn't think that the powers-that-be would work like that.

I thought that they were self-obsessed incompetents who seized upon this or that most recent piece of "educational" research in order to please their masters and mistresses, who were actually also self-obsessed incompetents, but further up the food chain.

Then after the devastation that was the closure of my beloved Foxwood, which seemed to involve a lot of money spent on consultants, the refurbishing of Cross Green to turn it into Copperfields, and a long-winded re-organisation and rehiring of staff, plus the design of and the making of and the purchase of new uniforms, new signage, new this and that with the new logos. . . . .

 . . . . Well after that [that colossal and pointless waste of money in order to save money] I developed an interest in these matters. Over the following years,  I went to just about all the "consultation" meetings in Leeds for closure and mergers. And heyho! How they seemed to involve demolition and rebuilds.

And worse, by now they had invented PFI, so the new builds came with very long and very expensive strings attached: Company A would design (well!) and build the new school. But having kindly put the money up for the building, the company now charges school rent for the next 25 or 30 years after which they may or may not still own it. After that the school may or may not belong to itself. And, and I'm only guessing here, the roof will probably still leak.

And so PFI, also draining the NHS of all it can get, sets about plundering education. Leeds schools are paying rent to shareholders in far-flung countries while having to make TAs and teachers in the UK redundant. Aided and abetted by Ofsted - but that is for another blog and another day.

Now this "rent " was not money that the school was used to paying, and it was not already catered for in the budget. The hook was that a "decaying" old building would be replaced at no initial expense to the school with a brand new one. The fact is that the old buildings were not so unfit for purpose . . .

To make matters even more sinister, the ancillary staff who managed the building such as caretakers and cleaners would no longer be employed by the head and the governors but by the construction firm. The incomes from letting out any rooms for music centres or sports clubs now went directly to construction firms and its shareholders; the inconvenience all rests on the school. If a music teacher wants to run an after-school practice in her or his music room, s/he must book it. What!

Well, we in Leeds have seen enough of these new builds to know that "building schools for the future" was no more than a nice little epithet. I have never forgotten the day that I was at a governors' meeting with members of Education Leeds. They were joking about how many cranes you have at any one time on the Leeds skyline. A shiver ran down my spine! They were proud. They thought their power amusing.

                                                   *  *  *

 I was at the seasonal occasion a few years back when Chris Edwards of Education Leeds told us that this would be his last Christmas at Leeds, and added he hoped we would get all we wanted for Christmas. I openly opined that he had already just done that. But it was too late for Royal Park, Leopold, Askett Hill, Agnes Stewart, Braimwood, Parklands, and the other thirty plus Leeds schools that his improbable regime had put an end to.

Now it seems the population is growing after all and we need some new builds. I wonder how they will be funded!

Inspectors take opposing view, Schools take the Blame for Poverty

In 1994 when I was Head Of Music at Foxwood School, the inspector (who stayed all week with me) and who was a music specialist, watched me teach the music listening course that myself and colleague, Mr Phillips had devised between us, and told me that we should publish it. The school passed its inspection but was closed 2 years later.


Foxwood tutor group early eighties


In in 2003, a couple of weeks into being Acting Head of Music at City of Leeds School, the Ofsted inspector told me that you should "never, my dear, talk over music". Well, in the initial stages of the course, sometimes you have to, and the fact that three students merited their own separate TA should have indicated something to this woman about how well we were controlling behaviour! And I published my book on teaching music* a couple of years later.

Ten years later - after two proposed mergers, one with Carr Manor, and one with St Michael's, after a proposal to make it a 14-19 vocational centre, after two attempts to academise, after federating it with Primrose,  then defederating it, but leaving the sixth form with Primrose, after proposing an outright closure and sending students all round the city, after chucking out the acting head, and then half the governing body (including myself) and imposing an IEB, the school finally succumbed to academisation this year.

 

City of Leeds previous logo

However, during this time, no inspections were actually failed! My own two younger children got 8 or 9 A-Cs each as a hard core of amazing staff kept the place ticking over. And they will keep on doing it, while academy bosses stuff the kids into purple-edged blazers paid for by the public money that once paid for Special Needs and Music services etc, etc, etc .

I make two points here:
1. faced with an identical listening course, two inspectors took a completely opposite view, and
2. the very existence of published inspections means that children from deprived areas will always have their schools scrutinised and attacked for all the wrong reasons . Until we attack poverty, and not the schools that try their best to support poor children, they will continue to suffer, as will, quite unbelievably, the staff who choose to work, and used to find their job satisfaction and their calling working in areas of deprivation.


* Including SEN in the Curriculum: Music, published David Fulton's, shortlisted for TES award

Teacher Bashing: A Very British Sport

There must a limit on how much Maths or Science a person needs to get through life. And is it necessary to memorise it all in detail, or would a once-only exploration suffice?

 

Michael Gove wants us, students and teachers, to learn more and to teach more, but he doesn't really care what It is as long as long you can test and measure and compare it to some other anything - school, county, country - whatever.

 

However he absolutely denies the training, expertise and experience of one of the most "educated" groups of people.

 

GCSEs, A levels, university, teacher training, CPD, secondments, learning from peers, and from the students themselves, then working in other industries, and having children ourselves, - all this helps teachers understand what makes their charges tick.

 

So I am having trouble understanding any ministers from the loathsome Blair, Adonis, Balls up to this latest monkey with a machine gun,. Why aren't they just proud of teachers and their commitment? Why do laypeople have such strong views on a profession they have not studied? Where did this mistrust come from?  Where's Spitting Image when you need it?

There is a limit on how many teachers you can alienate before there won't be enough to go round. 

 

Gove Will get the Education System he deserves; sadly, we will get the education system that he deserves . .

Who says kids are underperforming? Only people who have a vested interest in rubbishing teachers. 

How can you compare one country against another; one child against another? Why make children, or even countries jump through the same hoops when they come: countries and kids, in different shapes and sizes, with different needs at different times, and are at different stages of their development?

Trotting the old lines about getting the basics right gets us nowhere. You're not advantaging every child; you're giving industry a bigger pool of candidates to dip into, and thus, a bigger group of would-be workers to reject. What all this Maths and English if there's no job, or if your job requires a different type of basics? 

What the politicians and the public pronouncers don't know are the subtleties of teaching even these basics. Good English teaching is enhanced by good Music teaching, for example. A top mathematician is not much use to themselves or society if they have no morals, or if they are a bully? You can't just open children up and pour knowledge in. You must motivate them to want to learn; and really the more of one subject that you try to force in, the more they are likely to resent and resist.

Children, and countries also develop and mature at different rates, and measuring everyone at the same age is the most pointless, damaging, dangerous, ignorant thing to do. You learn nothing by it, and, if you then go on to make decisions based on these bizarre and unscientific measurements, you waste time, money and everyone's lives.

When the experts: teachers, teacher-trainers, professionals, teacher-unions - when these people speak out against the SATS, the Ofsteds, the academies and the like, the public pronouncers close their ears because it doesn't suit their arguments and their plans. They rubbish the very people that they really need to keep motivated. The best teachers will leave the profession and by the time the UK education has really fallen apart, Gove and henchmen will safely tucked up in their clubs. 

Who are we competing against, and why!

Any Answers  read my email and phoned me up - did  I want to speak? I opined that I hadn't got over the first time. I wrote this below, and ended with some personal info to prove that highly qualified teachers were in the inner-city, and trying hard to stay there!

One of the greatest damage done to school children, especially inner-city, poor school children is the careless, ignorant, unresearched talk that comes from people in power [ie MPs] on the lines of "We need to get the best teachers into the poorest schools". 

Well, we were there, still are there - teachers admired their city-over by people in the business, people in the know. We are people with Advanced Skills teacher status, published authors, people with awards and all the right qualifications. 

When children in poverty, when newly arrived monoglot, and often traumatised immigrants don't make the grades, they need the special kind of teaching that correctly identifies the need for academic teaching combined with counselling, personal support; they need someone who cares. They don't need to be pushed into the grade race. And the "social mobility", ie removing them from their families should only be considered carefully.

But careless talk cost teachers' careers and lives, demoralises the profession, closes their schools and hands them over to capitalists, who can only measure a school by its exam grades. 

I expect nothing better from this dangerous Tory government,  but I despair when a so-called Labour spokesman or woman trots out the trite and simplistic statements like "Pisa is a wake -up call" [actually that was Rachel Reeves on Questiontime, -  they are all at it!]. Why can't somebody in power challenge the whole sorry set of assertions and assumptions?

Here's some thoughts:

 

1. Wales dropped Ofsted; therefore it dropped standards. Scientifically proven? No.

 

2. UK/England is dropping behind its "competitors". Since when were other countries in a different stage of their educational development, our competitors?

 

3. PISA makes us 28th or whatever in the world. What is PISA? How is it calculated? What does it matter?

 

4. South Korea has great grades and great young suicides. Is this a good thing?

 

5. What is education for - industry or people?

 

6.What can't the professionals be trusted? Why are they [we] always regarded as the opposition?

 

Cheers, Victoria Jaquiss

FRSA

behaviour management specialist

co-author of "Including SEN in the Curriculum: Music" published David Fulton's 2005

author of the "Foxwood Songsheets"

writer of articles and reviews in various music and Special Needs magazines

nationally recognised trainer of teaching steel pans 

life-long inner-city teacher 

active NUT and MU member

education campaigner

Ofsted. Asking the Wrong Questions.

I see that the Inquistion has found its way to have a go at Nottingham, to blast a whole town.  You have to conclude that if so many whole groups of dedicated, experienced and trained professionals aren't getting the right answers, then Ofsted is probably asking the wrong questions.

There is more to life than exam results and academic success. Parents are obliged to send their children to school, and the least they can expect is that the school will take care of all their needs - social, personal, academic, sporting, creative, whatever. Children should not be asked to jump through the same hoops. They have different needs and different abilities.

Ofsetd, whatever its original purpose, is now a thoroughly nasty instrument of the government, keeping us all of in a state of terror.

Especially in a world when a job is not guaranteed it is more important than ever that the personal and creative needs of every individual child is addressed. And high time that we all stood up to this government [as we should have to its predecessor], refused to set SATs, and refused entry, at the school gates, to Ofsted. 

We ask our cildren not to give in to bullies, so why do we?

Education policy was clearly short-sighted

YEP Letters: September 12

Published on the 12 September 2013

Shock, horror! Leeds needs 4,000 new school places. To start off with, I think a few I-told-you-sos are in order.

Summer or winter, campaigners with local knowledge and educational expertise attended endless meetings after their days at work. And they opined that Educational Leeds’s car-crash of a school building policy was short-sighted.
I well remember the midwife at the West Leeds High School meeting who told the consultation meeting that the birth rate was going up, not down in Armley. And, on the other side of Leeds we noted that growing immigration trends was more likely to need Leopold expanded rather than closed down.
We argued the case time and time again against a smug and well-paid Education Leeds, whose representatives did not hail from Leeds, and who had no local knowledge; we pointed to Africa as we would now point to Eastern Europe. But they were on a mission to make a difference, and they closed down and/or merged approximately 40 Leeds primary schools.
Today we have to put things right, but there are mistakes we should avoid. We must:
1. Listen to the unions and other campaigners. They are not in it for the money or power – there being none for this type of work. They are in it for the children and their education.
2. Understand that first generation immigrants tend to have bigger families than any subsequent generation.
3. Large schools for little children are not a good idea.
4. Children should not have to go to school in building sites
So, as the remote Gove spirals out of control, and has decreed that all new schools should be academies, play the game. Restore Royal Park, for example (a building much in need of occupants), call it Royal Park, Brudenell Annexe.
Give Miles Hill its heart back. But remember stuff happens and things change, so build in flexibility and community use provision for when the refugees go back and the families get smaller again.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, Education campaigner

Education, Poverty, and the Uselessness of a Gove

Any Questions was debating education, and why everyone was supposed to aspire to a university education.

How right the speaker was who said that this country does not properly value the non-academics! What use academia if it produces the likes of Gove? And for that matter, why are 50% of population being steered into a university life? For what possible purpose? For many, a life of under-achievement?

Finally the Any Questions' panellists are waking up to the small question of he effects of poverty on people's educational achievements. But they are not quite there yet. 

And while they get there, Gove and his successors will go on pointlessly closing the good schools who are working wonders in poor areas, giving them to, of all things, private businesses run by rich people who have even less idea about disadvantaged children than the government, and certainly a lot less than the teachers who presently care for them. 

And while the institutions that Adonis, Balls and Gove call "academies" manipulate their admissions and force feed the borderline kids Cs, their rejects fill up the inner city schools who are then rubbished by Ofsted and uploaded onto the Walls of Shame. 

The point yet to be understood is that the inner-city areas often include most cities' immigrant families, and some of these children will not be ready for a meaningful GCSE exam at the same age as the native monoglot or bilingual English speakers. This regime of League tables encourages schools to push all children to take exams at the same age, irrespective of their years' experience and knowledge of the subjects studied; irrespective of their emotional and mental health. Then they are let go, their usefulness over once they pass 16 years old. 

 

Noone needs the poor kids

Noone needs the poor kids.

Well all this started with the previous government with a Labour unelected politician name of Lord Adonis. No not his name, Lord, - he was a lord, a titled person, and obviously been given, or had he assumed a brief that was quite beyond his experience or knowledge.

He will go down infamously in history as pulling the first thread that unravelled  the great UK education system. And he abused the powers that he had assumed for himself by giving away public buildings and public institutions to private companies for no other reason than they were exactly that: private companies.

He wasn’t the first to start on the demonisation of the teaching profession. No, that honour rests with Margaret Thatcher. And he wasn’t the first to mess about with the English language.  Just as “With all due respect” came to mean “with no respect at all”, so a secondary school, if now controlled by a private business was to be an “academy”.  This had an implication of high standards, building on the use of this term for advanced football and other sporting institutions.

The definition of an Academy is that there is no definition. - usually this meant just a school that is excluding the children with challenging behaviour as fast as they can.  This way, no inner city kids were troubled by kids with troubles and troubling behaviour, and why not! You don’t send your kids to school so that they sit next to kids who have no control over their own behaviour and who can and do trash lessons.

So now your new school is named an academy, and it is placed in an inner-city area, eg Seacroft Leeds, but it doesn’t take all the children from the immediate neighbourhood. In order to have a greater mix of social classes it is operating a system it calls “fair-banding”, and selects the clientele. And it selects in the first place, and then again in the second place [by excluding anyone who is not going to give them to grades].

Thus, in Leeds, the David Young Academy.  Of course the other schools in Leeds are picking up its reject pupils, and it is not as if we all don’t know this, but how it is spun?

So this is the problem, and it is not the one that is being addressed. There are children in this country being abused, physically, mentally and sexually. There are pupils who live in such desperate poverty that are hungry; they go without holidays; they have no space to call their own; these children barely have shelter; and do you know, they sure do drag a school’s results down. And the school gets the blame for keeping these children.  For the school’s survival, you need to lose these needy children. It hardly seems fair that a school should be blamed for the neighbourhood’s problems.

And of course life is complicated these days by our immigrant kids; some families come to the UK as economic migrants [posh expression for from abroad and very poor], or as people fleeing persecution [euphemism for surviving war zones, in itself euphemism]. And how can you concentrate on life in a schoolroom when your head is still full of dead relatives? 

I think the best answer is to close all the high schools in the inner-city, so that the poor kids get dispersed around the city’s periphery and then, logically the richer kids will outnumber the poorer ones, and the school’s academic results won’t be too badly brought down. Obviously where this has started to happen the richer kids’ parents are now sending their children further out of the city, so now the ringroad schools have a disproportion of the poor, needy and non-English speakers. Only now they have travelled three miles away from their family homes to be there. 

And actually that’s not really going to improve their academic performance. If anything I’d say it was likely to worsen it. 

random bird of prey hovering over the charity run at Harewood House

The YEP entitled it, Education should be for children . . not industry

Thanks to Yorkshire Eveing for printing [most of] this on Tuesday.

Dear Editor

Well, as the summer holidays fade and the new school term beckons, teachers, parents and school students are bracing themselves for the results of the Gove’s latest machinations. 

Whichever schools he now has in his machine-gun sights, in his defence it must be said that his own education did not prepare him for his current job.  And also it must said he follows a long line of incompetent, stupid and dangerous education secretaries.

Education should be for children, not for industry. School should be the place where children can discover themselves, and be encouraged to follow their talents as they emerge.  A place where they learn to count, not a place where their efforts are counted.

But schools have become exam factories; teachers who generally go into teaching in order to do good find themselves being ordered to raise grades, not raise children. A set of good grades doesn’t guarantee you a job. It just gives your bosses-to-be a bigger pool to dip into.

Schools in Leeds have been pointlessly closed as the simplistic measurements that are league tables, and the often dangerous commentaries that are Ofsteds cast their shadows over them. Some schools were closed on the spurious grounds that they had “surplus places”.  Local Leeds schools in local areas: Royal Park, Foxwood, Agnes Stewart, Wortley, Miles Hill, Asket Hill [to name but five of the thirty-plus] were closed leaving their localities without that educational and social meeting place.  And only two years later finding the schools either side over-crowded, and even being built upon for extra classrooms.

It was a private education company [wrongly named on both counts: Education Leeds] that did most damage in Leeds, and it now is a conservative government pushing even more “education” into private hands.  

Never can it have been a more miserable time to go to school. Between League tables, Ofsted,  and the strange raising of the exam grade bars, all governments have done since the eighties, it seems, is to discover new ways to belittle teachers, and stress out their pupils.  But I already knew the world was crazy when “satisfactory” became not good enough.

Watching in dismay, as Education Leeds erased history, one school after another, I asked what would X factor winners and gold medallists do when they wanted to go back to their old school in triumph to celebrate. Well poor old Nicola Adams who won the first boxing woman’s gold for Team GB, went to inner-city Church of England mixed Agnes Stewart High School, and that was erased, educationally cleansed, and merged with . . . another church high school in the locality? No, with a secular boys only school – the only boys’ school in Leeds. And located nearby. No. Three miles away in the suburbs.

Could life get any worse? Yes, it could, but only if “good people do nothing”.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA teacher, writer, steelband leader, ex-school governor