The Challenges of Teaching
The goat is angry | Testing times | Colluding in inclusion | Bad behaviour | Kind words
The goat is angry
It was 1990. I was already a teacher with six solid years of experience, albeit gained in the relative tranquillity of the west of Ireland. None of this would prepare me for the mayhem in Hackney Schools.
Pupils, much taller and tougher than me, circled menacingly when I entered a classroom. Sometimes, they'd snigger at my Irish accent. More often than not, they'd just ignore me. Conventional teaching methods did not work.
Incensed by their disrespect I jumped on a desk and belted out a Gaelic tune. Ha la loo, ha la loo, ha la loo, tá an puc ar buile which roughly translates as 'the goat is angry!' My behaviour was bizarre enough to grab their attention. And from then on, music was my medium, yet I had to teach with an iron hand. I lasted six months!
Testing times
Like the examples in Undercover Teacher, there were good reasons to explain the appalling behaviour of my Hackney class. They'd had 17 different supply teachers in the previous year as their teacher was on leave with depression induced by job stress. Most of them could not read or do basic maths. Many had difficult home lives – absent or working parents, low income and no motivation. Inevitably they were ill equipped to cope with the school curriculum.
Fifteen years on, judging from the surly teenagers featured in Undercover Teacher, the situation is just as bad. Joe Lewis, a geography teacher for the past 23 years, agrees. 'The problems are no worse. It's just that kids are under much more pressure from the demands of the national curriculum. They're in a constant state of assessment.'
Since the Education Reform Act of 1988, the compulsory National Curriculum introduced key stage tests (SATs) where pupils are assessed at various stages throughout their education from age five onwards. The Independent Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) headed by Chief Inspector, David Bell, inspect all state schools and report on standards. They publish the performance of each school via the dreaded League Tables.
Undercover Teacher revealed the extent to which a school will fiddle its conditions to survive the Ofsted inspection. 'Shipping off the difficult kids on a school trip during the inspections is not unusual,' laughs Tasha Kingham, who almost gave up the profession after a harrowing year as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) in a South London Comprehensive.
'Raw out of college, I had the responsibility of designing and delivering a range of A Level courses with no help. Even though the school had Beacon status, (one of the country's 266 high performing schools and supposedly a benchmark in best practice), the pressure for high marks meant there was an air of constant hysteria. I was completely drained.'
It is even worse for inexperienced teachers or teachers in special measures schools when using the yard stick of the League Tables.
Colluding in inclusion
A hallmark of Labour's education policy is their insistence that pupils are not excluded. 'What do you do if you've got an autistic child who's just pulled out a clump of your hair and is punching the faces of his fellow pupils,' wonders Rebecca Elliott, a teacher with 10 years experience, reflecting on a recent incident in a school in Southwark.
'I've yet to meet a teacher who agrees with the government's policy on inclusion. Come down to the front line and you'll see how children with severe behavioural and learning difficulties wreck the chances of the whole class.'
Some schools try to buy their way out of the 'inclusion' policy by paying Local Education Authorities (LEA) up to £6000 a head to move students off-roll. That is twice what it actually costs to educate the average child. 'What we really need are more school-based support services funded by the LEA. But the more deprived the borough, the less money the local authority has to provide this kind of support,' remarks a rueful Rebecca.
Bad behaviour
Undercover Teacher isn't the first film to highlight acute discipline problems in schools. Veteran documentary maker, Robert Graef's Classroom Chaos which was aired on Channel 5 in April 2005, had similar findings:
- An erosion of teacher's authority where the kids were in control
- Antagonism between teachers and parents who blamed teachers for discipline problems they'd failed to tackle at home
- prescriptive curriculum with ever-changing guidelines
- student inclusion.
Sadly the cycle of governments in office conflicts with the longer term five year cycle of the secondary school programme.
Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly's proposals for a National Discipline Code should help. It sets out support and sanctions in schools – clearly lacking in the Leeds schools featured in the programme.
'It may seem a bit obvious,' says seasoned teacher, Joe Lewis 'We've got a few basic rules which the kids recognise – allowing others to work; arriving on time; working quietly. If a pupil's disruptive, they get parked at the back of another class. Three parkings and their parents are summoned to arrange exclusion. The kid learns that a significant number of parkings means trouble so it's an effective sanction.'
The Ofsted constrictions are also now being loosened. From September, inspections will only take up to two days as opposed to 10 weeks. They will focus on reports from the staff about school progress and will include selective rather than blanket checks in the actual classrooms.
Kind words
The short-term effectiveness of the authoritarian head teacher in the Islington School featured in Undercover Teacher is not a favoured approach. 'We've got to remember these kids are human beings who hold the future of our civilisation in their hands,' emphasises Rebecca Elliott.
The findings of the first government-funded study of Steiner schools in England should be significant. Rudolf Steiner, the German educationalist, founded Steiner schools in 1919. There are now 23 independent Steiner schools in the UK. Their remit is to educate the whole child using creativity in the broadest sense and many of their pupils go on to further education passing GCSEs and A Levels. This may make a case against constant testing in favour of the holistic human relationship between pupils and teachers.
A Manchester primary school has recently received £40,000 to experiment with Montessori methods (a child-centred approach to learning) in the hope of improving its performance.
'Schools need to be more tuned into the harsh reality of home life – kids who've never shared a proper family meal, or been cuddled,' says parent, Mary Collins, a teacher for 30 years and now a social worker running parenting courses. 'No wonder they've got problems with concentration given our acquisitive TV culture. Younger parents can't handle the demands.'
'What I'd like to see,' she says, 'is a documentary celebrating the phenomenal successes of teachers and schools all over the country.
Documentaries like Undercover Teacher raise the alarm bells. The horrors facing teachers will continue unless adequate governmental support is provided to ease the pressures resulting from rigid assessments and inhibitive inclusion policies. Greater incentives are also required to keep younger energetic teachers in the profession. Otherwise the visionary young bloods may opt for less stressful occupations like undercover documentary reporting!