3. Teaching

Ten things to be done immediately to improve work/life balance

1. Stop Ofsted inspecting teachers as this is already done continuously by the school’s management and is effective.
Ofsted should only check the governors and senior teaching staff for teacher management and financial competence. The reliability of Ofsted’s data is already under question.
 
2. Trust the teacher to teach by stopping needless lesson plans. They are an insult to competent teachers. I taught in a school where the only thing the head wanted to see was a daily diary of my lessons and comments. Of course I had to plan my own lessons.
 
3. Change the way student’s learning competence is checked.
In Primary schools all work has to have a green comment and Learning Objective ticked or stared to meet Ofsted’s criteria. 150 books each day.
 
4. Stop the introduction of “Progress 8” league tables and remove the current system of grading by letters with “C” as the benchmark for a pass or failure; it is the old “O–level”. Simply grade by percentage and do not publish.
Each year’s intake differs and comparison with other schools is impossible.
Vocational subjects are now excluded as they don’t count as not being academic. Food and Design Technology have started to disappear from the syllabus.
 
5. Staff briefings are another waste of time. 25% of the teachers will be on duty, most messages are irrelevant and some are too detailed to take in. Send messages electronically by email. UK’s notional cost saving would be £3 million a year; this is based on £19 an hour.
Workload Challenge report, UK Dept of Ed 2015
 
6. Halt all curriculum and examination changes. Edexcel Examination board is owned by Pearson Education PLC who publishes text books to match their exams. I go into schools and see row upon row on hardly used textbooks for old exams hidden in store cupboards. Millions of pounds of tax payer’s money are being squandered.
 
7. Make all career advisors and prospective university students understand the risk/benefit factors of a university education. The knowledge gained is short lived but its cost remains for a very long time. Too many students never get to use the knowledge learnt. Is their an alternative?
It is an expensive ‘right of passage’ from ‘teenager to adulthood’.
 
8. Stop telling students that they must have a university degree to get a job. Too many students never get to use what they have learnt. There are alternatives.
 
9. Make universities responsible for the complete university service including Graduate Tax with legally enforceable contracts covered by consumer law. Reduce courses to two years to lower overall costs.
 
10. Digitise all the curriculum knowledge from inception to sixth form. No animations, questions or activities just the knowledge in words and pictures. A new Wiki.

Comments on our education system.

Educational Select Committee found that evidence of the impact from academies and free schools is inconclusive. Successive governments have devoted massive amounts of time and money on something that appears to have made little difference. Yet our politicians want more Grammars and Academies.
 
In the DEMOS Think Tank’s report “Tale of two classrooms”, they say the variation in English schools is down to pupil’s prior attainment.

 
Education Director of OECD, who produce the PISCA test results, has written a report Seven big myths about top performing school systems. In it he says there is no relationship between class size and learning outcomes; it is the quality of the teacher that is more important.
Some of the highest performing countries were gradually moving away from the system in which students were streamed into different types of secondary schools.
Success in education systems is no longer about how much money is spent but on how the money is used.
 
The pressure on primary school teachers is already intolerable and the problem is now being highlighted by the media. “Teachers self harming”. Listen to the following Radio Four programme Sick of School. File on Four.

New league tables.

The new “Progress 8” league tables are a step too far. It has four measures for progress and exam results with a possible 5th to show students future destinations after school.
It is weighted 75% to academic subjects with English and Maths counted twice.
International Baccalaureate and IGCSE are not counted resulting in some schools automatically failing.
Non academic subjects BTEC, NVQ & ELC’s will be severely disadvantaged to the point of extinction. Creative subjects sidelined.
There is ample room for subject/data manipulation. Smoke and mirrors”
 
Don’t ask “how intelligent a child is”, ask rather, “how is this child intelligent”.
Radio Four Midweek 28.30 mins
Exams put children under ‘vile, cruel pressure’,
By Sir Anthony Seldon, Headmaster, Wellington College.

One rule in business
If you create a system that is too difficult to understand
Change it

Qualified teachers

Parent’s perception is that the best education is given by “Qualified Teachers”, in reality, that’s far from the truth.
Does one or three years of teacher training straight out of school equip a teenager to become a teacher? A few might. What makes a good teacher?
 
So these are characteristics of the best teachers. In terms of weighting, perhaps 30 per cent is subject knowledge, 30 per cent is personality, 30 per cent is level of expectations, 10 per cent classroom skills. Of these, only the last need be the subject of teacher training.
What really makes a good teacher by Barnaby Lenon, former Harrow headmaster, Independent Schools Council Chairman.
 
My nine month teacher training in Technology was back in 1969 and you passed if you could write English, (most of us were mature students). After years in Mechanical and Industrial Design followed by sales and marketing, I finally started teaching Resistant Materials in 1994 as a supply teacher. 21 years later, I am still working in supply but only a few days a week. Teaching is a physically demanding job
 
What skills did my professional life bring?
A wide range of real life theoretical and practical skills and a passion for the subject, demanding a high quality outcome. One advantage of being a supply teacher going into a problematic situation was that I ignored the national curriculum. Every student finished their practical work at the expense of theory. (Sir, this was the first time I have ever finished a project).
 
Another advantage of being a supply teacher was that I taught from Year 1 to 13 in every type of school from 18 months to one day.
In today’s world, teachers have to put on a performance in competition with the media our children see every day. I liken it to a comic who has a script to follow, use humour to engage the audience and silences any hecklers.
Teachers today need to be highly organised to handle the vast amout of data.
 
Teachers don’t like this next part.
My years selling were an extremely useful in teaching as it uses basically the same methods.
Tell them what you are going to tell them. (Plenary)
Tell them. (Message)
Tell them what you told them. (Recap)
The only difference is that salesmen do not get paid if they don’t make a sale.
 
One of the other fundamental selling skills is to listen, asking the probing question trying to find the customer’s “Hot Spot” and then closing down each section of the pitch with the statment “ OK, you are happy with that”.
Good teachers do this instinctively.
 
You don’t need a qualification to be a good teacher
Do teachers need to be qualified?
Online teaching from Hong Kong