Saturday, March 1, 2014

‘Student Voice’ demoralises teachers, encourages irresponsibility and promotes a culture of excuses

Back in September 2004, during my first year of teaching, a senior member of staff politely rebuked me for pushing in front of a student in the lunch queue. ‘They don’t like it when you push in front of them,’ she said.
I, albeit in a state of bewilderment, begrudgingly acceded to her request before heading back to my classroom and ruminating on its implications. When I was at school, I thought, only nine years earlier, the teachers always pushed in front of us students. They even sat on a raised platform, overlooking us, their young deferential charges. We didn’t consider it to be inequitable. They were our teachers and that was that. Does this innovation, I pondered, represent a break from the traditional conception of teacher-student relations? I felt a tinge of discomfort as I considered the possible consequences of this new direction.
Ten years on, it is brutally clear why I was so exercised. My discomfort was indeed well founded.  I now inhabit a world in which the adults openly exhibit a deep respect and reverence for the children; the children, in contrast, counter-intuitively and contrary to common sense, view the adults as little more than servile providers of a mundane service. My admonishment was certainly a harbinger of things to come.
According to the latest edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), 73 per cent of schools in the UK ask their students for written feedback on the performance of teachers and the quality of lessons. Furthermore, in a troubling extension of this relatively recent trend, many are now arguing that student feedback should be used to determine teachers’ pay. So teachers are being treated like restaurateurs and hoteliers, open to public criticism and, if Michael Gove’s Policy Exchange gets its way, salary determined by customer satisfaction – the students, of course, being the customers.
Honestly! Where do they think up this inane folly? I simply do not buy the assertion that student feedback improves educational outcomes. In fact, in my opinion, determined by ten years of experience, not only does it have a dramatic and detrimental impact on teacher morale; it also encourages student irresponsibility and a culture of excuses – two factors that contrive to ensure educational failure.
First, though, let’s consider the effect on teachers. Many disgruntled students, in my school at least, where the children are widely consulted, use it as an instrument of torture for the hapless staff member on the wrong end of their wrath.  Moreover, they feel buoyed by a new found freedom, an intoxicating sense of power that inevitably leads to a combination of arrogance and smugness.
For us teachers, though, there is no such perverse pleasure. We are reduced to obsequiousness and desperate attempts to ingratiate ourselves with the children judging us. Often this manifests itself in the construction of ‘fun’ tasks that do nothing to help student progress; or teachers choosing not to sanction unruly behaviour, fearful of the child’s subsequent response. You can only imagine how demoralising and downright demeaning it is – negative feelings that will only worsen if ‘Student Voice’ is used as a determinant of teacher pay.
Secondly, however, and most importantly, we need to consider its impact on the children themselves. They are being given a responsibility for which they are unprepared and unqualified. Many cannot recognise, for example, the value of efficacious teaching methods that may be construed as boring. In short, although many of our students are intelligent and sensible, others lack the maturity to make judgements about a teacher’s ability, their vision clouded by petty disputes, perceived slights and the fickle nature of peer pressure.
On the odd occasion, it would indeed do schools no harm to consider why children are still living at home, cared for by parents and carers. This societal convention implies, quite rightly, that children cannot fend for themselves, make sensible, prudent decisions, or judge what is in their best interests. Adults, therefore, make the decisions for them. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t listen to their concerns. Of course we should. But we should do it with circumspection and careful thought. We should not, under any circumstances, institutionalise a system that gives children a decisive say in the appraisal, thus the lives, of teachers and their families. Giving them such an enormous responsibility is unfair on them, if nothing else.
Paradoxically, moreover, encouraging children to formally evaluate teacher performance divests them of any meaningful responsibility for their own progress. After all, they are being taught, albeit unintentionally, to search for excuses. It must be Mr Robinson’s fault. His lessons are boring. This misguided, interminable focus on the teacher can only lead to student fecklessness and, as an inevitable consequence, underachievement and failure. Regrettably the students have been led to believe, quite erroneously, that we – the teachers – have more to lose than them. It is incredibly sad to see.
The kids do the bare minimum; we, in contrast, run around like headless chickens, demoralised and exhausted, working 15-hour days, six days a week. It can only be described as perverse. Call me an old fashioned traditionalist, but shouldn’t the students be evaluating their own performances, and, rather than being taught to make excuses and denounce adults, be taught to accept their respective circumstances and work hard regardless? It is the Senior Leadership Team’s job to root out professional shortcomings, after all, not the children’s.
Back in 2004, when my career was in its infancy, I bore witness to an egalitarian phenomenon that has done enormous damage to our education system. ‘Student Voice’, its natural offshoot, should be renounced and discarded without delay. Children need to be given back their childhoods, and teachers, their pride.

Also published on www.conservativehome.com on January 30, 2014

Is Michael Gove playing into the hands of ‘The Blob’?

The expansion of the academies programme is being promoted as the long-awaited solution to educational underachievement. According to the Government, the pathology of failure will be eradicated by sponsored schools, liberated from the stultifying shackles of local authority control. Greater autonomy will lead to the removal of needless bureaucracy; innovative, pioneering ideas will be free to flourish, and standards will inexorably rise as a result. Moreover, in a bid to encourage competition, popular schools will expand whilst their failing counterparts disappear. Sound good? The Coalition certainly thinks so.
Yet as a teacher who works in one, in my opinion, academies aren’t the catchall panaceas being touted. First of all, let’s address the root causes of underachievement. In many schools, including mine, bad behaviour and indiscipline are the most important factors responsible for student failure. Indeed, common sense tells us that nobody can learn in an anarchic environment, and, regrettably, anarchic environments have been inadvertently created throughout the state school system over the last 20-odd years.
In my school, as is the case in many other schools, this problem has been created by the blind refusal of our senior leaders to discipline disruptive children. They are solely responsible for our current malaise.
I did once hope that reform would accompany academy status. Perhaps our sponsors would take the opportunity to dismiss our underperforming leadership – something, ironically, being considered by the local authority before the academy took over. How wrong I was. Instead they foolishly renewed the Senior Leadership Team’s (SLT) legitimacy and with it, ensured the survival of the status quo. SLT, buoyed by its benefactors, remains stubbornly wedded, against all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to an outdated Leftist dogma that proscribes the punishment of badly behaved students. As a consequence, our children are still prevented from learning by unrestrained, recalcitrant yobs.
My fear is that Leftism – unashamedly promoted by Marxist and ex-Marxist school leaders – is so deeply ingrained in our schools that, with a few notable exceptions, only like-minded individuals and organisations are interested in running them. Our academy is just one example. So the academies programme, rather than incentivising a stronger approach to behaviour management through increased competition is, in reality, granting greater autonomy – and therefore greater power – to the very people responsible for our current problems.
Likewise, as with the academies policy, the Government’s decision to make it easier for head teachers to dismiss failing staff seems, prima facie, perfectly reasonable; after all, it happens in every other profession. But, I hear myself ponder, when is Mr Gove going to address the problem of failing heads and poor behaviour? Up until now, his actions have failed to match his rhetoric on behaviour, and he has said very little about the scourge of poor leadership. Indeed, he appears to believe that declining standards and failing schools are caused by bad teachers protected by omnipotent unions. In this analysis, head teachers are innocent victims, bullied and shackled by a malignant conspiracy. In reality, though, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Our head’s ideological commitment to ‘non-judgementalism’ has led to classroom chaos and poor standards. If we, the teaching staff, have the audacity to complain about the inhumane treatment we suffer as a consequence, we are threatened and bullied into silence. Our unions are pusillanimous in the face of a wily, union-savvy head and a conflict of interest – after all, they represent members of the SLT as well as ordinary classroom teachers. I am not against this proposal – poor teachers should be fired -, neither am I against the introduction of performance related pay, but I am concerned that it will give left-wing heads a licence to dispose of unwanted, conservative staff who would like to see rules enforced and higher standards of discipline. Is Michael Gove, through these reforms, playing into the hands of ‘The Blob’?

Also published on www.conservativehome.com on November 24, 2013

Gay marriage has nothing to do with equal rights

Entering the discussion over gay marriage, especially when one has misgivings, as I do, is a dangerous endeavour. The level of hysteria surrounding the subject is indeed frightening; the virulence of attacks dispensed by opponents prohibiting. Nevertheless, and after tortured deliberation, I have decided to enter the fray and risk vilification.

As a school teacher I witness, on a daily basis, the malign consequences of family breakdown caused, in large part, by the erosion of marriage and the loss of respect for its historic role as benign cultivator of the next generation. For a vast array of reasons, too numerous to discuss here, marriage has become a rather quaint, old-fashioned commodity to be coveted, and then casually discarded once the initial impulse wears off. For many couples, moreover, it is an anachronism to be completely rejected, even though to do so makes a break-up - with all its harmful consequences for the innocent children involved - statistically more likely. 

The innumerable, irrefutable societal benefits accrued as a result of traditional marriage are therefore being lost to modernity. Its demise should indeed be a cause for great concern. 

It is against this backdrop, in my view, that the debate over gay marriage should be conducted; yet in its current manifestation, the intimidation suffered by those of us brave enough to stick our heads above the parapet and loudly, unapologetically, venerate traditional marriage does not only coarsen the quality of public discourse, it also retards it as most traditionalists, or neo-heretics, demur from taking part lest they're publicly branded homophobes. Sadly, as a result, we are in danger of enacting a profound, irreversible change without having had a mature, intelligent national conversation about its effects on an institution responsible for the stability of community life over the last two millennia. 

As the law currently stands, a marriage is consummated through sexual intercourse as an expression of love and the primordial human desire to procreate. Its absence is indeed a reason for annulment. But if constituted, gay marriage will effectively rescind this essential marital rite thus altering the very meaning of the term. Sexual intercourse will no longer be seen as an important aspect of married life. Yet if the sexual imperative no longer exists, and marriage simply becomes a legal union, devoid of any meaning beyond the arrangement of one's tax affairs, why not allow two sisters to marry or, perhaps, and rather alarmingly, even a mother and son?

Surely extending the right to marry erodes its sanctity and fails to recognise its unique contribution, in its current form, to the health of society. It will thus be derogated, debased and, as a consequence, devalued.

This is not to belittle the laudable aims of gay couples to celebrate their relationships, aims that have been rightly recognised through civil partnerships. But what's the purpose of getting married and, just as importantly, staying married if it has no greater meaning than any other legally binding contract? Stripped of its essence, people, especially the young, even more so than now, will view marriage as nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults - an agreement to be frivolously entered into and whimsically broken. In short, my objections to gay marriage are not based upon some atavistic, deep-rooted, antediluvian antipathy towards homosexuals; they are based upon a teacher's concern for the survival of an already beleaguered national institution that appears to be in its death throes and the malign social consequences of its demise, consequences that I see every day.

So why are so many commentators, lobbyists and activists so keen to see the destruction of marriage, to the obvious detriment of society, to satisfy some bogus vision of equality? After all, for all intents and purposes, homosexual couples already enjoy equal rights through the imposition of civil partnerships. Why do some so-called libertarians now feel the need to eviscerate marriage as well? What is so wrong with recognizing the special, unique place in society of traditional marriage as an institution that conceives and nurtures the young? Is that not possible whilst also recognizing the unique, but ultimately different, benefits conferred upon society by civil partnerships, too?

Alas, many believe that it isn't. But I suspect a more sinister force at work. An unholy alliance of cunning Gramsci-inspired cultural Marxists, genuine - though inane - equality campaigners and an indifferent, unsuspecting public are conspiring to realise Marxist aims - a conspiracy orchestrated, of course, by the Marxists themselves. The petit-bourgeois family unit, spawned, accreted and supported by marriage, is anathema to the extreme Left; not only have these Leftists encouraged promiscuity, as their even more extreme brethren did in Soviet Russia during the twenties, and discouraged marriage through the tax system - an astonishing act that the Tories were, and still are, happy to acquiesce to -  but now they see the opportunity, through the veneer of bravely fighting inequality, to destroy marriage once and for all.

The naivety of our political masters is truly breath-taking. This debate is not just about equal rights; it is about the preservation of an institution that bestows an incalculable number of benefits upon society, benefits that I am, in my profession, due to their conspicuous absence, all too aware of. It should therefore be protected and celebrated, not assaulted as a result of specious reasoning and misguided sentimentality.