Below is part of a Sunday Telegraph report by a woman who was a supply teacher for six months and visited 16 schools in that time. She was reporting for Channel 4 Dispatches and the programme will be shown on Thursday at 9pm. It should be worth watching.
What struck me very early on was that poor, even outrageous indiscipline - children leaping across tables or wandering around brandishing fire extinguishers - had become acceptable. At one school, I was calmly advised by a female colleague to lock the classroom door while I was teaching, to "protect" myself and my class from the marauding groups in the corridors. The look of surprise on my face did not seem to register with her.Time and again I would be surprised, and shocked, and eventually deeply saddened by what I saw in the state school system. A combination of classroom disorder, endless supply teachers, conscientious but jaded staff and school managers who seemed prepared to pretend that all was well had created a situation that was a million miles away from the Government rhetoric of rising standards.
Every day children told me that they could not learn, that there "was nowt to learn for". Yet in every chaotic classroom, there were one or two pupils huddled over books trying to do their work.
There is a section on how her school put on a false mask for the Ofsted inspection. It makes one wonder about the value of any inspections which are not completely unannounced. The new inspection regime that is starting this year, reduces the warning that schools get, but they still get some time to delude the inspectors.
When Ofsted inspectors arrived the week after for a two-day visit, however, the school was suddenly transformed. I got through a whole lesson without incident, the corridors were mayhem-free, the atmosphere calmer. The mystery was solved by a classroom assistant who told me in a hushed exchange in the lavatory that more than 20 of the most difficult pupils had been sent on a "day trip".As inspectors monitored lessons, senior managers popped up taking classes that they did not normally teach. Experienced teachers from neighbouring schools were parachuted in. One teacher, who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, said: "I've been drafted in basically to give support to this department while HMI are in. It's a bit of a con-job really." Staff at three other schools told me that "hiding" problem pupils from inspectors was common practice.
One should probably put in a few caveats. It is quite likely that those schools which make the biggest demand on supply teachers are the ones with the greatest problems. So what she describes probably does not describe the average but something below the average. However it is a grim picture. We also know that poor people are the ones who end up in the below-average schools. So people like Tony Blair who can get their children into the above-average state schools, are spared this.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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It is a good rule that anyone who says anything like "I'm doing this for the children" is a liar. Groups like the NSPCC do nothing except launch scare campaigns, whose function is to raise more money.
Those who actually do do things for the children just get on with it.
Posted by: Paul at July 4, 2005 04:25 PM
Reading the TES today, I came across the latest way of getting the results up ; tell them the answers in advance.
The DfES have provided high schools with booster materials for English, Maths and Science - dictatorial lessons which are more or less compulsory (The English one is 328 pages long)
It is comically micro-prescriptive (some "optional" lesson plans contain instructions to "Raise your voice and wait for the class to be quiet")
Anyway, for 2005 this contained a full sample worked answer to the question :
"How is the idea of love exploited in these extracts ?" (from Much Ado without nothing).
In the actual 2005 test, the question was, on the exact same extracts
"What do we learn about Benedick's attitude to love and marriage in these extracts ?"
Why not be honest about it and write the answers on the question paper ?
Posted by: Paul at July 4, 2005 08:13 PM
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It's rather pathetic that Tony Blair has reportedly had a go at Charles Clarke about going soft on behaviour. There is no way anything can change unless the Children act of 1991 is repealed. To do this would require far more cojones than Blair has, let alone Clarke: the children's rights lobby knows exactly how to pull all the right strings, and they can make a meal of anyone who dares to upset their applecart. However, remember Maragaret Thatcher: in 1983,even the Spectator was simpering that she had gone too far in opposing Scargill. Alas, they don't make politicians like her any more.
Should one be lurking in the Westminster undergrowth, I should imagine that the children's rights lobby would prove just as vulnerable as the NUM was, for the simple reason that teachers now are just as fed up as the miners were with their bosses.
Posted by: tom burkard at July 4, 2005 03:12 PM