By Joanne Lewin, NEU member
In an attempt to undermine the powers of teachers and local authorities, the last decade has seen growing academisation of schools under Conservative governments. But this has also coincided with catastrophic funding cuts. According to a recent Observer investigation, 60% of the government’s own flagship academies are expressing alarm over unsustainable finances; with pay and staffing levels being areas of great concern. Government attempts to plug the gaps are so far embarrassingly unsuccessful; in the last year teacher recruitment has dropped by 37% despite a 150% increase in spending by the Department for Education in trying to advertise jobs in the teaching profession: £5.6 million was spent between 2014 and 2015, but in the last year this skyrocketed to £14 million.
Pressure on Teachers
It is unsurprising that the government has failed to plug the gaps in the teaching profession. The list of responsibilities of classroom teachers is growing while real-term pay has fallen by almost 15% since 2005. New curriculum changes and managerial changes also offer opportunity for a culture of bullying, favouritism and ludicrously excessive scrutiny of teachers. Nowadays, it is far too easy for a headteacher to take a dislike to an experienced member of staff and find some pretexts to put them on ‘capability’ procedures, as a prelude to getting rid of them.
The pressures on teachers include graded observations masquerading as ‘learning walks’, and book-looks in which teachers are held accountable for a child’s messy handwriting or unfinished work. One trainee teacher in my own school has been observed around 16 times in one term, not with any real intention to give constructive feedback to a new teacher, and certainly not through any suspicion of poor teaching ability, but purely for the sake of a plethora of invented purposes, like “Learning Area Reviews”, “Department Reviews”, or “Learning Walks” as well as numerous other pointless but disruptive measures, allegedly to ensure that a job is being done properly.
The TES website is littered with articles in which teachers up and down the country have expressed frustration at never seeing their own families because of the demands of planning and marking, or at finding their workload has destroyed their passion for teaching because it increasingly includes dictated criteria and mindless “box-ticking” to keep middle-leaders satisfied. Every other teacher I speak to inside or outside of my own school, whether recently-qualified or experienced, seems to have a five- or ten-year plan to get out of the profession, either by moving abroad to teach, undergoing a career change, or seeking early retirement.
Obsession with pointless league tables
One of the most important means of putting pressure on teacher are league tables. Last week saw the announcement of the School League Tables for Secondary Schools, Sixth Forms, and FE colleges. These tables create an atmosphere of fear, urgency and almost panic, spreading down from school managers to staff, but without in any way adding to the process of teaching and learning in schools.
The tables are based on the GCSE and A-level results, broken down in the form of two new measures of data, Progress 8 and Attainment 8. These two new measures take the eight GCSE grades in which a pupil is demonstrating their best performance. The ‘performance’ pupils at age of 16 is based on predictions made from primary school data, from the age of around 10 or 11. A measure of 0 (zero) demonstrates that pupils, on average, met their expected target grades, whereas a grade of -0.5 would demonstrate that pupils averaged half a grade below target, and likewise -1.0 would demonstrate that pupils were a whole grade below expected target. In contrast, 0.5 and 1.0 would demonstrate that pupils made more progress than initially expected and may average half a grade or even a whole grade above their predictions. Schools in any local area, therefore, are compared to one another based on the average progress and attainment of students in each institution.
What Progress 8 and Attainment 8 fail to take into account, of course, is that predictions made based on primary school data has a tendency to be wildly inaccurate years down the line. But more importantly, data ignores the glaringly obvious: that humans are not robots. Children, teenagers, and young adults are not statistics and should not be treated as such, and all of them have their own personal challenges, needs, and aspirations which could hinder or help their progress. In addition to this, schools and their staff are under growing pressure and strain from insufficient finances, growing workload, and staff shortages. Progress 8 and Attainment 8 fail to acknowledge the momentous achievements of staff and students to simply keep teaching while trying to keep mental and physical health intact.
The combination has not served to be beneficial to schools or to pupils. According to Progress 8 and Attainment 8 scoring, 2017 saw a 29% increase in schools falling below the government’s own floor standard, while 60% of pupils failed to achieve a grade 5 or above at GCSE in Maths and English (the equivalent of a secure C Grade in the older grading system). Mary Boustead, joint General Secretary of the National Education Union has put this down to a “toxic mix” of “rapid-fire changes to the curriculum and to accountability measures, driven by central government, at a time when they are educating more pupils than ever before, together with a crisis in teacher supply and acute funding pressures”.
Schools on the frontline
Schools are not just functioning as educational institutions anymore, but teaching staff are increasingly at the very frontline of reporting, protection and safeguarding children from harm. An estimated two out of three teachers will make reports within the space of 12 months and directly contribute to the crucial work of child social services. The number of children in the care system at any one time is at record levels and is increasing year on year, as a result of abuse. According to the NSPCC, the number of children needing child protective services have increased in recent years, with reports of emotional abuse, neglect and sexual exploitation. Couple this with poor job prospects and growing pressures on young people to perform better in timed examinations and it is unsurprising that the NSPCC has predicted a “time-bomb” for a youth mental health crisis in the UK. An estimated one in four young girls suffer from low self-esteem and poor mental health, and yet one in six young people are turned away from the over-stretched mental health services under the NHS.
Schools and teachers are on the lookout for poverty and neglect, sexual exploitation, emotional and physical signs of abuse by adults or peers, female genital mutilation, religious and political radicalisation, racism, sexism and bigotry among pupils, diagnosed and undiagnosed special educational needs and learning difficulties, gender and sexuality identity crises, and more, all while trying to plan, mark and teach effectively and meet completely arbitrary targets and predictions.
Effects on the classroom
One in 83 teachers in the UK will go on long-term stress leave in 2018, an increase from three years ago when this figure was one in 95. And even this figure still only accounts for the number who are willing to declare absence from work due to stress and mental ill health, but stigmatisation of mental health and fear of being placed capability measures often deters staff from ever wanting to openly express their inability to cope. Teachers talk of “impossible pressures” and feeling “overworked and undervalued”. 78% of teachers in Scotland feel they do not have a good work-life balance. The disruption to student learning is palpable; pupils feel abandoned and demoralised, even blaming themselves for the obvious low morale or absences of staff.
According to new research by Leeds Beckett University more than half of teachers have experienced poor mental health, of which half had been recognised by a GP. The detriment to teaching was expressed as follows: 77% of teachers said that poor mental health effected the progress of their pupils, 89% felt less creative in the classroom, 85% believed poor mental health adversely affected the quality of lesson planning, 73% said their ability to explain things deteriorated, 72% said their questioning skills – which provoke and encourage learning – suffered as a result. In other words, a teacher’s very ability to teach is being eroded by growing pressures and responsibilities.
While teacher pay is a major grievance to most staff, teachers never enter their profession for the pay. Any teacher asked why they entered their profession will respond that it was their passion for their specialist subject, it was the joy of sharing their knowledge, it was working with young people, or making a difference to young lives which first saw them turn towards teaching as a career. But what is clear is that low pay has become an insult to injury; if workload is not radically cut down or pay increased to compensate for growing proportion of workload, not only will the education system continue to struggle to recruit more teachers, but it will also experience as mass exodus of teachers who no longer have the resources, time, energy or willpower to maintain the profession. Be prepared to see Progress 8 and Attainment 8 scores plummet further.
January 30, 2018
