The Easter period always provides a timely opportunity for teachers to recharge their batteries, catch up on some lost sleep and spend time with their families before hurtling headlong into the summer term and exam season. However, not everyone is resting up for the full two weeks, indeed many teachers will have spent a number of days in school, organising and delivering revision classes for year 11, 12 and 13 students. It never fails to amaze me how teachers, up and down the country, continue to go the extra mile to support their students and this warms my heart immensely.
Conversely, it never fails to amaze me how politicians in our country seem to continually do everything they can to make our jobs more difficult and compromise educational provision for this generation of young people. This two-week break in the school calendar tends to also bring with it some educational announcements from the government and typically we also hear strong opposition from the teaching unions during their annual conferences.
One topic that has been prominent this year has been the government’s obsession with grammar schools and reintroducing these in an attempt, they say, to improve social mobility.
Reading, listening and watching the educational sections of national news reporting recently, I was reminded of the Gove-gaff from 2012 when he was questioned by the Education Select Committee on how all schools could be “good”, if this constituted being above the national average. “By getting better all the time,” was his response. Not all schools can be above the national average, Michael.
Words failed me again when I read some of the rhetoric spouting from our current secretary of state for education, Justine Greening, as she claimed “grammar schools are very popular with parents”. I’m sorry Justine, but I’m not sure parents will be the ones making the decisions on whether children will get into these new grammar schools, that is the whole point of a selective education system – the schools will select the pupils.
How a selective school system can be revamped or re-invented when there is no educational research that suggests it improves social mobility for disadvantaged students is beyond me. I find it equally appalling that our government is prepared to invest £320 million into funding new grammar schools at the same time as schools are facing an eight per cent real-terms cut to our budgets in the forthcoming years. It speaks volumes for what the aims of this government are in terms of education.
Ms Greening recently appeared on BBC News and was given a hard time, and rightly so. The secretary of state predictably meandered her way around some straight questions, avoided giving straight answers and failed to acknowledge the reality with which schools are faced. We simply do not have enough money.
At my school we have the leanest of timetables where teachers are “maxed out” in terms of their teaching loads; we have an extremely small number of surplus periods across the teaching staff; I have trimmed my senior leadership team by 40 per cent over two years; and in the same time I have reduced support staff costs by almost half.
We have reduced costs significantly over recent years and I am confident we have done everything possible to operate efficiently. Yet still, we are struggling to “live within our means” and with large class sizes, reduced levels of administrative support and an extremely sparse SEN provision, I have serious concerns for the quality of education we can deliver and for health and wellbeing of my staff.
I’m asking my teachers to do more with less and there is only so much goodwill I can expect from my team before they fall over or down tools.
With the state that our profession is in with regard to teacher retention we need to be doing more to look after our teachers.
Following the news of the snap General Election, I am sure that we will see a great deal more in the media about what each political party has planned for education. I just hope, for a change, we start to see politicians putting children and teachers at the centre of their plans and that they genuinely start to listen to the professionals.
- SecEd’s headteacher diarist is in his third year of headship at a comprehensive school in the Midlands.