UKC

Morale in the profession is not looking good:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/04/half-of-teachers-consider-...

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/30/one-in-five-school-staff-v...

In reply to Offwidth:

Pretty terrible, but I don't think this is anything new is it? I thought these sort of problems have been around for quite a while.

That said, it would be interesting to put them into context. I mean - how do teachers compare to other public sector careers for example? Is this a problem for just teachers of other public sector workers?

In reply to Offwidth:


The survey on morale make me laugh along the lines of

1. 50% of engineers consider leaving their jobs as they are not happy
2. 80% of McDonalds staff consider leaving McDonalds
2. 50% of workers consider leaving their jobs as they are not satisfied

A survey which when you think about it, proves nothing, other than people want to move jobs because they are not happy.

In reply to Offwidth:

So for Paramedics...

Survey of East England Ambulance trust says 55 per cent thinking of leaving
http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/11831874.Hundreds_of_paramedics_may_quit_du...

Stats released by London Ambulance Service has a 12.6% actual leaving rate per year.

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2015-07-06.5646.h

So maybe that could be a rough guide of 50% thinking about leaving, and 10% actually leaving in a year.

In reply to Offwidth:

Must agree with other posters above. This seems to make teachers happier than most journalists I know. In fact most are now ex-journalists and when I meet those still working they usually begin the conversation with 'You were smart to get out when you did'

In reply to Offwidth:

Most teachers I know would leave if they could - I left without a job to go to as continuing with the required workload would have killed me - and this was in a good school. Fine if people think this is just teachers moaning but the Education system is nearing being irreversibly FUBAR - along with most other public services.

In reply to Wiley Coyote:

I'd expect journalists to be cynical...a highly disrupted profession run mainly by people with little or no real journalistic ethics.

It doesn't matter though, this is about teachers and the first is the latest in a regular survey and indicates things seem to be getting suddenly worse. This matters partly because the timing is bad: TPS allows easy early departure above 55 (albeit with actuarial deduction) and there is a demographic pension issue facing the profession after 2018 (as the payout for those at the top of a scale is the best three years in the last ten and given pay freezes since the crash, pensional pay index linked from back then exceeds real pay by quite a lot... but the gap closes fast from 2019: so much so that experienced teachers might even reduce their pension by working an extra year).

In reply to Offwidth:
Ref thepeaks, two posts above: What a depressingly negative attitude from somebody who has the good fortune to live in one of the safest, best-organised, healthiest and least corrupt counties on the planet.

In reply to Rigid Raider:


Couldn't agree more. Nothing wrong with Derbyshire!

In reply to Offwidth:

The second survey is more concerning to my mind - the idea that one child can ruin the career and life of an entirely innocent teacher is a real problem.

In reply to neilh:






Precisely hmmm Precisley noo , Precisely

In reply to Rigid Raider:


I entirely agree. Just giving you a heads up on the way things are heading.

In reply to thepeaks:


I can think of many people working who would leave if they could. Only you need to work to live and most people are tied into a career based on their skill set most of which is pretty focussed.

So the question is, is "50% [of teachers] want to leave" normal across other professions? There is no context. Sounds like Tim Halford of More or Less needs to investigate this one.

Is that because it's a professional that attracts a lot of people who don't know what to do for a career, and then leave or want to leave for something better/easier/different when they find out how hard it it?

In reply to Philip:

Nah - that is just anecdotal. You don't know what drives people to become teachers... unless you have asked all teachers - which I doubt. And even if you are correct, it has nothing to do with why they might wish to leave. Correlation does not imply causation.

My question simply - "Is 50% of respondents to a survey stating they wish to leave their profession significant?"

In reply to ByEek:


Yep but increasing numbers of teachers appear to be actually leaving which coupled with a recently increased birthrate means things could get sketchy in the next 10 yrs.

In reply to ByEek:


Err ... holidays ... init .

In reply to mp3ferret:

Yes amongst other factors.
Anecdotal with people I know: profile tends to be, I want to make a difference, I don't aspire to become very rich (otherwise I'd become a banker), I want to work locally (impossible in certain fields) and teaching has some perks (pay is ok but 12 weeks holidays a year).

Sometimes, I feel I want to leave the profession because:.
1) I am increasingly asked to treat my class like a business (which is probably impossible) whilst still "caring" about my unique individuals- pupils. The two are not possible in any meaningful way unless, you have no life during term-time, don't need to sleep at night or don't care for/spend time with your family.

2)Political meddling with the highly emotive electoral battlefield that is education annoys me too. Everyone wants to be the next person to crack education and get a plaque for it. This results in stupid, harmful, and unmanageable policies that I am asked to implement as a foot soldier- Common private, go storm those trenches ...what do you mean there's machine gun fire!!!

3) Expectation of the Government do not match expectations of parents which in turns do not match expectations of pupils, which rarely match worker's expectations (teachers') of as easy a life as possible.

4) Everybody keeps telling me, I am lucky.... But what they don't see is that I do not come in and leave with pupils (9.00-3.40pm). I come in at 8.00 and leave often at 6.00. During that time I'll be lucky if I get 40 minutes break including loo stop. I do not take anything home but many do. Within that time, I cannot fulfill my contract and I am already overtime! This is my 5 minutes break in corrections because my pupils' French is so depressingly shit that I wanted a break from the red pen scoring!

5) Finally, I sometimes lose the will to live because whatever I do, I am always the person responsible: I am the target stakeholder. The government tells me I am inefficient and lazy, parents tell me I should spend all my free time to make their kids better, pupils tell me that what I do is boring (well try correcting your garbage!) when I don't have control over what it is I do.

I suspect many professions will find that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. I am very unlikely to leave the job because I still occasionally believe that what I do is useful, I have a decent wage and I have enough holidays to forget the nonsense I am asked to do.

In reply to Offwidth:

I gave up teaching 10 years ago (after 10 tears in the job), largley for the reasons outlined by Erik above. At the time almost every other member of staff congratulated me on getting out, including the head! They all said they would do the same if only they could think of something else to do.
The reason more don't is because by the time they've been ground into the dirt they're middle aged in a reasonably well paid job with kids and a mortgage. To leave at that stage would mean a big paycut before they could work their way back up which they can't afford to do so they grit their teeth and cling on until they can take early retirement at the first opportunity.
Since I left things have got a lot worse and I know quite a few teachers who weren't trapped (as above) who just got out and took anything they could get, the big pay cut was worth it just to retain their sanity and have a life again. I genuinely believe its only a matter of time before we start to see teacher suicides, its unsustainable to work under the current level of pressure for 40 years.

In reply to pec:
I can totally believe it! (And I can see it having a child in P2 in Scotland) Same at university (where I work) Unsustainable pressures. We have had a spate of stress related diseases amongst staff - strokes, high blood pressure,etc, still people come in because they know what pressure it puts on their colleagues if they go off sick and so it continues. It is completely unsustainable.

In reply to pec:

I have a client whose friend gave up a head of department job, even though it meant a loss of pay, just in order to gain some small amount of free time. The client and friend worked out that it would mean "only a loss of £250 or so per month", and that it was worth it to regain sanity.

My girlfriend has likewise moved to teaching two days a week and then working 2.5 days a week at a university(ironically in the teacher training department-so she may be said to be feeding the lie). She feels that the university will be able to offer her full time work next year, so is convinced that she has less than ten months to go before finishing teaching-"hurrah" she says. In the meantime she is taking a cut in pay to make the move. She is already happier.

In reply to Offwidth:

My daughter is a teacher so I am fully aware of the pressures and the time involved. However, I think that does not invalidate the point that I and other posters have made ie that just about every job is the same these days in that the pressures grow, the workload increases and satisfaction slumps. Duroing my career I bored for Britain on what a great job journalism was but I'd no more encourage a kid to become a journo now than I'd advise them to be a coal miner. When I was head of content on a daily paper 20 years ago I had 64 staff whose job it was to meet one main deadline a day (plus a few minor slip editions but they were easy enough) to fill the paper and their job was either to write the words or take the snaps. Today my counterpart has about 35 staff to fill the same paper, plus feed the website, which effectively means a non-stop rolling deadline. The numbers of staff snappers has been reduced by 75pc or on some papers cut to zero. Reporters are now expected to provide not just more words for more stories a day but also pictures and in some cases video, plus feeds for social media like twitter to send out teasers.It used to be a great job, now it's a treadmill, in an industry dominated by accountants with no feel for journalism at all. Their current love is 'user-generated content' which roughly translates to 'Email us whatever cr4p you want about how brilliant you are and we'll throw it in more or less unchecked if it fills the space between the ads and costs us nothing (except what tiny shred of credibility we have managed to accidentally hang on to). You can imagine what wonders it works on morale seeing such pap in your paper. But of course it doesn't matter if staff morale is at rock bottom because you are going to make them redundant next week anyway. So I repeat, I accept teaching is tough for all the reasons others have outlined but I also repeat so are many, if not all, other jobs these days.

In reply to Wiley Coyote:

This is spot on unfortunately. My girlfriend just finished working her regular 14 hours on a Monday in her role as a chief reporter a couple of hours ago. She'll do that twice more this week, plus 2 more 10 hour days and another 10 or so spread over the weekend. Pretty standard. All for a shit wage, shit holiday entitlement, near constant abuse by the public - she was called a "c***" in public the other day by a local businessman - and constant pressure. I work for a local paper too, similar hours, though more unsociable than hers would you believe - though more enjoyable work. Less money, less job security and zero paid holiday. We appear to have taken leave of our senses - frankly everything else looks piss easy from where we're standing.

In reply to French Erick:

I feel your pain - almost literally - i'm married to a teacher.

In reply to French Erick:

I've just quit a position a a failing middle school for a short term position at a great high school. I'm taking a pay cut of thousands..

But I don't mind the roughness of the kids, constant fighting, disrespect, violence. It's something you get used to. What I really dislike is pushing kids through the system when they are not progressing. We have kids in grade 7 who are academically grade 1 or grade 2 and we are meant to teach the curriculum to them but they just are not ready to learn at that level.

I enjoy the teaching side, but think the system is totally failing those kids. In the end another school district contacted me asking me to cover a maternity leave and so I'm moving there. I feel bad leaving the kids but don't have time to fight the system in my first year of teaching, whilst doing my teaching cert in the job. We are basically a school which gets the roughest kids dumped into. Today 16 of my 22 grade 7 kids were suspended, the 6 who were in the class were there because most were already suspended when the other 16 went crazy last week.

I'm pretty amazed at the lack of support in the district. The salary is great, holidays great, but we're just a conveyor belt to the prison and they just seem to be writing off these kids and pushing them through the school system, regardless of grades.

In reply to French Erick:
Well said Sir. Perfect response to the lazy attitude evoked above of "You live in the UK so you have no right to complain"

I've dated a couple of teachers and from the sounds of it, apart from loving the kids and the general idea of teaching, they were overworked, underpayed and underappreciated.

In reply to Philip:


Know what you are saying and to a degree it probably has some truth to it. But my SO got in to teaching for the love of teaching kids. She has worked in the UK for 10 years 6 in the same school. The UK education system has left her broken and disillusioned as to whether she want to teach.

Pay, pensions and retirement do not factor in to any of this. It is purely down to working conditions and work load (60 hour week is not uncommon). She has had to defend what she has said numerous times because so kid has made up some bullsh1t story, thankfully it has never become serious, but throw enough sh1t and something may stick.

In reply to Offwidth:

I find it very odd that a profession with such a strong union regularly works the hours that are being touted around.

It's shocking that head teachers are allowing their staff to get to such a state.

Where are their management skills and training? I suspect there is a culture ingrained here that needs to be broken.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Individual heads can't overturn the policy that creates the problem and their jobs are often more of a nightmare than those they manage. Ditto for the unions with the tight constraints they face on any action (which is about to get even tighter). Their views are hardly surprising...

http://www.naht.org.uk/welcome/news-and-media/key-topics/pay-and-conditions...

http://www.teachers.org.uk/node/23410

In reply to DancingOnRock:




Heads are under massive pressure from above re results. Part of the issue is that there are 3 teaching unions - 4 if you count NAHT - which dilutes the strength plus traditionally teachers are very idealistic and committed people who are reluctant to disrupt pupils learning by striking.

In reply to Offwidth:

But hardly any will leave...ever..certainly nothing like 50%. It's an opportunity to register a moan that will be heard. Similarly, a third of Scottish police offers are apparently considering quitting......but they won't

In reply to thepeaks:


They may well be, but one of the jobs of a manager is to be a intermediary to enable his staff to work efficiently and to report back when the demands are completely unrealistic.

In reply to Offwidth:

The main annoyance I heard from a teacher recently was a costly"top heavy" teacher management structure and the pointless initiatives (resulting from it ?).

In reply to Offwidth:

I guess it's a more widespread public-sector thing. OK, life is tough - often more tough in the private sector, but at least there, you can do something about it. All they can do in the public sector is to try to swarm their way up the greasy pole armed with copious amounts of smarminess of various flavours and it's rare these days to find a cosy niche where they can just rest and take in the view - all to often they find themselves running to stand still, or slipping slowly backwards.

In reply to DancingOnRock:


On my first management course they dished out a questionaire which included 'To whom are you responsible?' Naturally we all diligently wrote down the name of our line manager or director. The tutor instantly came back with 'What about the people who work for you?'

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Report back to who? The head is in charge and policy is set by government and compliance maintained by OFSTED.

Given some of the comments here maybe the country will end up with what it deserves but I still hold out some hope for better public and government support for vocationally motivated people who just want to get on with their job in something that is vital for the future of the country. Its amazing how places like Finland can do the same job with massive public support and much greater success, with no diversive split systems, almost no inspection, a much more relaxed attitude toward what kids need to do and when etc (ie training the profession well and trusting them).

In reply to Offwidth:

More news:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/05/teacher-shortage-pupils-pe...

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/06/uk-educate-kids-headteache...

In reply to Offwidth:




All my life there have been swings between a desperate shortage of teachers and teachers being made redundant. Given the relatively short training time (unlike say doctors) you might expect government to be able to manage numbers better.

In reply to Andy Morley: I can't put my finger on it but there is something about the language in your post that just seems so disrespectful. Maybe it is the suggestion that public sector workers can 'ONLY swarm etc etc

In reply to puppythedog:


Something I can put my finger on - you need to get over yourself.

In reply to DancingOnRock: How are you going to report back when your superiors when theyre politicians with an agenda that may or may not be right. And when any complaining gets you marked as a whining leftie

What are you going to say - Ive missed targets, can teach the full cirricula, overspent horribly because I didnt want to to destroy my staff long term/short term.

This is not a typical workforce , doing a typical job - part of the deal with teaching is that you put up with some grief and hassle , getting in return some appreciation for doing a job thats socially value. I wouldn´t do it, but I appreciate those that do.

In reply to Andy Morley: Pot kettle Black

Three little words

In reply to Offwidth:



I agree with that sentiment...

I do, however, personally believe that - to some degree - those working in schools have to shoulder some of the responsibility for the situation in which they find themselves. For years, people have run round like idiots painting a false picture of what is actually possible on a day-to-day basis for the benefit of OFSTED. It's not abnormal for people to work double their normal hours before an inspection, and for their lessons at that time to not represent the job they usually do. Then, when the bar is set ridiculously high, creating pressure and expecting people to work like that all the time, people cry foul. I'm not saying there aren't any other factors - there are many! I do, however, see many of the people complaining about workload as the same people playing up to SLT and OFSTED just to get a good "rating" in their observations. Similarly, many heads play games with young people's lives by pushing them towards Mickey Mouse copy and paste qualifications just to make the numbers at GCSE look good. Then when the numbers are good through game playing they cry foul when people expect them to keep good results year on year, while taking away the Mickey Mouse qualifications. Saying they have to do this because of pressure from above isn't acknowledging the full picture. They can and should be saying no to things that won't improve teaching and learning for teachers and students in the long term. They can and should be realistic about the hours they are willing to work with their managers. Instead, many just "play the game" hoping for a promotion and more money and spend their days just longing for the next holiday...maybe other public sector jobs are the same. I came into teaching a few years ago and love being in the classroom. I never met so many apathetic yes-people when I was working in industry. Teachers should be questioning more, and heads should be speaking out more about what needs changing. Everyone's just so scared to put their head above the parapet. How can we expect to develop our young people as critical thinking problem solvers when we can't muster the will to display those qualities ourselves?

In reply to 1234None:

Have to agree with Dave here. Schools do themselves a disservice by jumping through the hoops to portray a false impression of themselves. The unions irritate me because they focus on examples which can easily be dismissed. My union sent me a document before the election which said something like "65% of teachers receive emails out of office hours" and "92% of teachers receive work related emails even when they are off sick". Neither of which is a problem unless your school expected you to be picking these up.

The workload in teaching is high, and I'm certainly not capable of fulfilling the full expectations on me. I'm happy if I can deliver decent lessons and provide useful feedback to my pupils from marking. I've had a good start in teaching though, and I feel my school is reasonable and professional in its expectations overall.

In reply to wbo:

Lol - you're absolutely right. I myself have worked in both private and public sector - local government and the NHS amongst others, so I have first hand experience!

In reply to ByEek:

Perhaps you should ask all of the teachers on UKC what prompted them to become teachers. If holidays and salary don't come top then they are deluding themselves.

In reply to French Erick:










Amen, brother.

In reply to 1234None:

I'd agree with most of that but most people become cogs in a machine if the system wants a machine. Saying no is a lot harder than you imply unless its a common cause. I say no sometimes (and calmly explain why) in a similar Uni context and it pisses some important people off and I only get away with it because I've lots of experience and have worked on sensible evidenced based stuff with management for decades and through that have made just about enough friends in high places; the average lecturer would likely be heading for a competance or maybe even disciplinary situation if they did it as often.

In reply to thepeaks:


Actually there are 7, I could go on about that in a lot of detail but I won't...

There are undoubtedly issues to be dealt with on workload, and recruitment, but worth noting the similarities/difference between this survey and the one that was put out just before the Tory conference last year - https://www.teachers.org.uk/node/22376 :

Last year: 90% thought about quitting in the last 2 years
This year: 53% thinking about quitting in the next 2 years

In reply to Removed UserMike Rhodes:



Three pupils left my lesson today and thanked me for delivering an interesting lesson that they really enjoyed. The parent of a boy I taught a couple of years ago phoned me to tell me that her son had achieved the highest marks possible in internal tests in the army - he has been presented with a special award. She said that he put it down to the lengthy essays that I made him write. A boy that I struggled to engage throughout the whole of last year told me that he loves English now and that he wants to be a primary school teacher when he leaves school.

These things don't happen all of the time, but when they do they remind me of the reasons that I became a teacher.

None of these reasons include holidays or salary.

In reply to Morty:

Did I say that I am reasonably happy to teach?
Yes I like my holidays.
I do not have a gripe against pay so long as the demands do not become such that I am not ready to do it for the money I am paid.
It goes without saying that despite this job being rather vocational, I only work to earn a living. If tomorrow I won the lottery, I would walk out the doors without a second glance.

DJ has it spot on. We are all guilty by complicity. Why do we always say yes? For the better good of the kids? If we're sick at heart and unhappy kids will have sub-optimal teaching! Reminds me of the plane safety stuff - put the mask on you before attending to anyone else!

In reply to DancingOnRock:




No disrespect but I don't think you really understand how education works these days. Teaching is a profession not a "job". As such you work whatever hours it takes to get done what you have to do (which is an ever increasing amount), not 8 till 5 then downtools and go home and forget about it. You can't stand in front of a class and say sorry , there's no lesson today I hadn't got it planned by the end of my shift yesterday.

Head teachers may well sympathise with their staff (mine certainly did) but they are under huge pressure for the school to be seen to jump through whatever hoops the government has deemed desirable. The buck stops with them, they can't say to Offsted sorry we haven't achieved our targets because I won't let let my staff work more than 40 hours a week. They'll put the school in special measures which is a living nightmare for everyone and the sack the head.

The culture that needs to be broken is that of a succession of education ministers who know little or nothing about education other than "they once went to school", who want to stamp their mark on education, mistakenly believe that better exam results equates to a better education and think that people can sustain the same work load for a 40 year teaching career as they do for their 5 years in office on a quarter of the pay.

In reply to pec:




I'll reply to both you and Offwidth by agreeing with peakDJ.

That's what the unions are supposed to do. Unite everyone and push back. When the ministers and OFSTED come round, tell them to go away. You're not playing their game. When every single head in the country stands up and says don't bother sending them, we're not letting them in - someone will have to listen.

As PeakDJ says they've made a rod for their own backs.

I've taken my son out of the crazy system. That's how confident I am in it.

In reply to DancingOnRock:


You can't consider teaching in isolation. The Roman Empire was, in its heyday, run by an incredibly small number of civil servants. Then, the administration started to grow... the rest, as they say, is history. Public sectors have a tendency to grow until they become so unwieldy that they collapse, or, the society that supports them becomes moribund - both these things applied at various stages to the former Eastern Bloc countries. On the journey that takes you there, conditions within 'the system' become ever more unpleasant, or 'crazy' as you put it.

You can take a political stance that says - "This is good, we want more..." in which case you vote Jeremy Corbyn.
You can equally take a political stance that says - "This is bad and needs to be curtailed" in which case you probably vote David Cameron.
Or, you can take an evolutionary stance that sits back and watches it all unfold until such time as you decide you want to emigrate. Personally, I'd still rather live in this country than any other, but I recognise that all sorts of interesting and painful transitions are occurring, and I'm really not at all sure what historians will be saying about it all 50 or 100 years from now.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I suppose so.

Or you can start lobbying people to get it fixed.

In reply to DancingOnRock:


You can indeed - and your ideas of what's necessary or expedient to 'get it fixed' are likely to be drastically different from other people's ideas on the same subject, so political conflict and dialectics arise. Personally, I concur with Richard Dawkins - that this is every bit as much a process of evolution and 'natural selection' as the biological version.

In reply to Removed UserMike Rhodes:


For me I genuinely enjoy teaching.

I enjoy learning more myself and you do as a teacher, even learning about teaching, developing new teaching skills, its fun in a hard sort of way.

Yes holidays and salary are decent, I'm on 35k a year but I buy a lot of my own class materials, but with a degree and PhD that's about the norm for an entry position.

As it is I have taken a risk and resigned a job where I earn $60k a year to earn $150 a day as a long term sub at a much better school at the high school level.

So no salary isnt a top consideration or I wouldnt have walked away from a much higher salary.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

But teaching isn't unionised in the way that some traditional blue collar areas still are. You'll never get the same unified stand or striking rate from teachers because unions aren't really part of the culture in most schools. So the idea of standing up and being counted doesn't work - in the end, as you say, most people just moan about things. I think teachers in China work hard too...

In reply to Removed UserMike Rhodes:

Nonsense. When I wasn't a teacher I could afford better holidays becuase the prices are crazy during the school holiday.

I'm a teacher because I enjoy working with children and young adults. The salary is OK, but hardly amazing.

In reply to DancingOnRock:





I'm sorry but you've just demonstarted again that you really don't understand how the world of education works. Teaching is not like coal mining was in the 70's when everyone was part of one big powerful union who'd all walk out on the whim of a shop steward. Most teachers are only in a union to give them some support in the event of a malicious allegation. Despite the popular myth, poltical activism is very rare in teaching. They are professionals trying to do their best for the pupils. Even if you could get 4 different unions to agree a common strategy who knows how long they would have to strike to achieve anything, in modern Britain that's just not how things work anymore.

As to the nature of the actual job, teachers and even headteachers have remarkably little autonomy these days. They are just cogs in a very big and overwhelming machine which dictates what must be done. I know this is a bad analogy but its the best I can think of off the top of my head but lots of people knew what the Nazis were doing was wrong but individually and even collectively they were powerless to stop it, a small but powerful group at the top wielded absolute control. In a far less unpleasant way, the politicisation of education by successive governments has gained an almost unstoppable momentum.

In reply to 1234None:

I note that you've only been teaching a few years, wait until you've been ground into the dirt by another 10 years in the job and see if you feel the same. Most of us started out full of enthusiasm but you can only bang your head against a brick wall for so many years before you realise all it achieves is to make your headache worse.

http://www.channel4.com/news/teachers-suicide-rates-double-in-a-year
These extracts from the link are particularly appropriate here
"And it is older members of the profession - those in the twilight of their careers - who are increasingly representing the majority of those committing suicide"
and
"research commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive, found that teaching is the most stressful profession in the UK"

In reply to Offwidth:

Could everyone please stop what they're doing and turn to face me. Are we all listening? Good. Could we all be absolutely clear that everything written in this thread is wrong. Can anyone tell me why?

That's right because everyone keeps saying "in this country" without realising there is no UK system of education. Now please get that right in future!!!

(Sighs and returns to looking at holiday brochure)

In reply to Father Noel Furlong:

Believe me, if I didn't have ties I would be at the border begging to be let in.

In reply to marsbar:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-34395383

In reply to pec:


Any teacher who feels that way really ought to do the decent thing and change career. My own 'O' and 'A' level results correlated directly with how enthusiastic and well-liked the subject teacher was, and I'm pretty damn certain I was fairly typical there.

I got a grade 1 in my physics 'O' level and a grade 2 for biology, whereas I only just scraped a pass (grade 6 I think) for chemistry. Guess which subject teacher corresponded in his approach to the above description? If you care at all about your pupils then you really should consider a change if you feel like that.

In reply to pec:

I understand perfectly how it works. I know plenty of people working in schools as teachers and as part of the leadership team.

The heads have a very difficult job. They also meet regularly and have conferences. The problem is they're all competing to become the best school in the area.

So it's interesting to hear comments that they hate the system because they often seem hell bent on becoming the best. Some acolade. Hmmmm.

In reply to dancingonrock: well that's a dirext consequence of the setup of the system. You can hate t, and be witness to all the negative consequences but the effects of not playing the system are so large you have to play it as best you can. I am sure you would be delighted if your children's school became the vanguard of protests, negatively impacting their perceived education

I believe that the heads have kicked up a fuss en masse in the past but have been effectively overwritten as education is something all politicians love to interfere with despite having no expertise in the subject

In reply to DancingOnRock:




Its the system which forces people to act as they do, you comply or get sacked.

In reply to Andy Morley:


As I tried to explain in my first post the problem goes like this.
Imagine you're 45 and been teaching for 20 years. You've got a mortgage to pay for and 2 or 3 kids to feed, clothe etc and in a few years they'll be off to university and need paying for. You're in a secure (relatively) job with a decent pension and earning c. £35k per year.
If you leave what are you going to do? You're too old to go back to uni etc to retrain/study and have no relvant experience in another career and anyway how do you pay for training or education whilst maintaining your financial commitments?
You're competing against all the bright young graduates and need to explain to a prospective employer why you're leaving your job and "I'm on the brink of a nervous breakdown" doesn't sound great. Even if you can find a job commensurate with your qualifications you go back to the bottom rung of the ladder and take a £15k pay cut which you can't afford because of your financial commitments and possibly, somewhere still deep inside, you do actually want to be a good teacher.
In an ideal world you'd leave but that won't pay your mortage or get your kids through uni. You're effectively trapped so you grit your teeth, do your best and hang in until you can escape with early retirement.
Its not ideal but its the system that's forced upon you that's driven you into this state and it doesn't need to be like this.

In reply to Andy Morley:

In addition to the points pec raised about teachers not necessarily having that option, it wouldn't necessarily benefit the students anyway. Yes, ideally, everyone would be taught by enthusiastic and motivated people with plenty of time to devote to them but a demotivated teacher who quits won't necessarily be replaced by somebody brilliant and motivated. In fact, that's very unlikely. In several subjects, there's every chance that if a teacher quit, the school might not be able to find a qualified replacement in the correct specialism at all! Physics is a prime example.

In reply to pec:

As I tried to explain in my first post the problem goes like this.
Imagine you're 45 and been teaching for 20 years. You've got a mortgage to pay for and 2 or 3 kids to feed, clothe etc and in a few years they'll be off to university and need paying for. You're in a secure (relatively) job with a decent pension and earning c. £35k per year.
If you leave what are you going to do? You're too old to go back to uni etc to retrain/study and have no relvant experience in another career and anyway how do you pay for training or education whilst maintaining your financial commitments?
You're competing against all the bright young graduates and need to explain to a prospective employer why you're leaving your job and "I'm on the brink of a nervous breakdown" doesn't sound great. Even if you can find a job commensurate with your qualifications you go back to the bottom rung of the ladder and take a £15k pay cut which you can't afford because of your financial commitments and possibly, somewhere still deep inside, you do actually want to be a good teacher.
In an ideal world you'd leave but that won't pay your mortage or get your kids through uni. You're effectively trapped so you grit your teeth, do your best and hang in until you can escape with early retirement.

That's no different to what is happening in other job sectors though.
In manufacturing and I'm pretty sure other sectors, the squeeze is very much on to get more from less people.
A lot of people are in the same boat - it isn't just teachers...

In reply to pec:



Been there, done that though I had four young kids when I decided I didn't like the company I worked for and threw the towel in. After 6 weeks of intensive job applications, I landed myself a 6 month contract and never looked back.

The trouble with public sector jobs is that they can be a trap, for the reasons you describe. I've been there too though I haven't succumbed to the trap - I left the public sector on two separate occasions because the sort of person you describe was precisely the sort of person I did not want to become.

We're all subject to constraints but we all have choice. If you are doing a job that you really no longer like, then you're not going to perform well in it. You can, if you so choose exercise what Jean Paul Sartre called 'mauvaise foi' (bad faith/ self-deception) and blame the system while your pupils suffer for your lack of courage to make a change. But you do have actually have the choice either to re-engage with what you are doing, or to move on.

One day, when you reach the end of your life, you may look back and reassess all this as you decide what kind of person you were. By then, it will be too late to change it. But you could decide to make a change now.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I'm waiting it out. Sooner or later things will swing back to teachers getting on with teaching, not messing about with data. I do what I have to of the nonsense, and ignore the ridiculous. Any attempts to interfere with this method are dealt with by a combination of "you know I get good results from students other people can't even get to sit on a chair" and a thorough analysis of just how pointless and statistically wrong their stupid data is.

In reply to marsbar:

>Any attempts to interfere with this method are dealt with by a combination of "you know I get good results from students other people can't even get to sit on a chair" and a thorough analysis of just how pointless and statistically wrong their stupid data is.

Yeah my Dad was like that. He was thoroughly p*ssed off with it all by the time he took early retirement. But he did stay really engaged with his pupils - I know that because I'm still mates with some of them and they had a real respect for him. He turned down the headship in fact because he preferred to stay hands on. He had plenty of run-ins with the head who took the job he turned down, always stood his ground, always got away with it because he was good at his job, he knew that and so did they.

My mum by contrast always re-trained in some new aspect of teaching when she got bored. She ended up as a peripatetic French teacher, going round all the little country primary schools, which she loved and kept on doing till she retired. Meanwhile my aunt had the best of all worlds, enjoyed her job, became a head and still keeps in regular contact with her old pupils at the age of 95.

Teachers complained about the state of their profession just as loudly back then as they do now. They complained about different things - low pay, lack of status and respect compared to 'the old days', but then, they had long holidays and short hours. Quite a few I knew had businesses that they pursued in the Easter and Summer holidays; I worked as a teenage sailing instructor for one such. When on another summer holiday job of my own, as a drivers mate, my driver was really shocked when we went to a timber yard that was almost entirely staffed by school teachers who were moonlighting over the summer holidays. Conditions change, the plusses and the minuses swing one way, then the other but the one constant is that teachers, like farmers, are always complaining about how bad things are and how hard their life is.

In reply to FactorXXX:


I don't suppose it is, but this quote from the link I posted earlier suggests teaching is at the far end of the spectrum.
"research commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive, found that teaching is the most stressful profession in the UK"
Its not research from one of the teaching unions which would obviously come to that conclusion

In reply to pec:

Maybe longer in the job does grind people down, but I have no intention of allowing myself to be ground into the dirt by anyone, in any profession.

Are you disagreeing with the fact that teachers could occasionally do more to help themselves? Of course, there are other factors like meddling politicians, but surely only those working in schools and classrooms have the power to make the required changes. People have been saying the same things about what's wrong for decades, and it doesn't look like governments are going to put them into practice. Who was it who said: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

In reply to Offwidth:

I too say "no" to stuff that I don't think will improve learning for students. If people become cogs, get frustrated, give up trying to effect positive change, then leave...we will only be left with those who are in it purely for the holidays and because they didn't know what else to do with their lives. Saying no to BS should be happening more often if the system is ever going to change and if people really want to deliver the best learning environments for kids. At times I've been forced to say "I'll do it because you're the boss, but I don't believe it's worth doing as it won't benefit the kids." More often, though, if the kids are learning and results are good I can get away with just saying no and not doing the truly superfluous crap. I could never put as much red pen in books as the marking policy suggests or differentiate between weaker/stronger students in every lesson. If something is unachievable, why not say so? Instead, too many others just become box-tickers making it look like they're achieving the unachievable through shortcuts that don't help the kids. Cherry picking books that make them look good when management ask to look at them to see if they comply with the marking policy. Spending all night planning for an SLT observation. This all makes it look like the policies and daft ideas are achievable, so on we go moaning about the. So many people in teaching have told me "why speak out and take the risk....just play the game..." That sort of attitude is pretty widespread. It isn't everyone, but it does exist in many. While it exists, these people have only themselves to blame. if I worked in a pie shop and the management asked me to just shove raw meat in the pies as a quick fix to increase production, while brushing the pastry with egg to make them a nice attractive golden brown, what would that mean about my desire to bake truly great pies? It's all about keeping the production figures up, and making everything look rosy on the surface to hide the shortcuts. I don't want to be a cog in that machine, so I can either choose to quit pie making or do the little I can to help change the system. Maybe idealistic and maybe a crap analogy...

In reply to 1234None:

How long have you been in the profession?

I'm in my second year but now in the Provisional teacher route/aletrnative route, basically in the job training. I'm reallynot in a position to risk like you think, I have to play the game or just move.

I really hate walking out on the kids who need me but I know our system is broken (we're the worst school in the state being closed next year) and I just cannot see me being ranked as effective in this system. If I had more security I'd fight it but I've a baby due next month and need to think about my own situation, and so when another school came with an offer, I initially rejected but then accepted on the second offer.

In reply to Roadrunner5:

Been teaching about 5 years. good luck managing the balance of what you think is best for the kids and what's best for your family. sounds tricky!

In reply to marsbar:


If you're referring to Scotland we've found different but equally effective ways to cock up our education system.

In reply to Removed UserMike Rhodes:


Is that a fact or did you just make that up out of thin air?

In reply to ByEek:
>> Perhaps you should ask all of the teachers on UKC what prompted them to become teachers. If holidays and salary don't come top then they are deluding themselves.

The father of one of my climbing partners seriously considered teaching recently following redundancy. He went for several sessions observation in the classroom and concluded that no way would he be prepared to put himself in that position. He'd probably have been really good at it, but his reasoning was that when it came to things like discipline, how teachers have to comport themselves these days and changed attitudes amongst parents, the odds would have been stacked against him.

I know a lot of people like him. I personally would never consider it in a million years. But I think it's as much to do with values as anything - the past 30 years has seen a rise of a kind of quasi-political ideology that's either subscribed to or kow-towed to by the bulk of those who work in public sector jobs. If you can believe in it or can play along with it, you will be OK, but if you can't bring yourself to swallow a certain brand of bullsh*t, then you don't stand a chance. I don't think any amount of money or holidays would get you over that one if you didn't have that particular skill-set, which as I see it, has nothing to do with being a good teacher.

In reply to Andy Morley:



>
I've had several friends who after successful careers in other spheres looked into, or even retrained, as teachers. Their experience was generally very similar to the one you describe. After working in the private sector the "quasi political ideology" you particularly grated. Another friend has taken up a job working in a local secondary school library and is staggered by what passes as "normal" behaviour amongst the kids.

I guess the standards of behaviour of and lack of ambition are societal problems that get transferred to the schoolroom.

In reply to Removed UserMike Rhodes:


Utterly ignorant statement.

Given how much my (UKC Member and Climbing Partner) wife has to work through her holidays, and more besides, and given the low wage she is on as a PhD graduate and, now, experienced teacher, I can tell you that there is no delusion.

My wife certainly did not become a teacher for those two reasons. Your statement is pathetic.

In reply to Postmanpat:
Its as much down to the Head or Principal. Over the past couple of years I have personally seen the difference between an average/poor head and a brilliant one.

The first thing the brilliant one did on appointment was say to parents." I will no longer deal with complaints over the phone or via email". There is now a proper channel to deal with them and that is via a letter. you will write in and there will be a letter back with a meeting. Everything will be properly recorded and it will be very formal. Guess what- all the whinging small complaints which took up so much time - all vanished overnight.

The same Head managed the teachers as well and turned things round pretty quickly.

Discipline also significantly improved.

To me as a parent the Head or Principal is the key driver to a school.If you get this right , everybody wins.

In reply to neilh:



>
Absolutely, which is why it's important to empower heads.

In reply to Andy Morley:
Secondary teaching has been a structural mess as long as I've lived so no wonder teachers complained back then. We had a grammar system alongside secondary moderns that made life judgements at 11 and assumed the kids that didn't make it, needed to stay at school longer than they used to, knowing they were fodder who might pick up skills at best (hardly a recipe for happy kids or teachers). The transformation to comps in most areas (right or wrong) was a very difficult time and a lot became sink schools at first (again horrible to teach in unless you had rhino hide). Over the years standards did improve but part of this was illusory (due to dilution of what the awards meant by allowing competing exam boards and no norm adjusting for the population and cheapskate marking).

People with professional vocational instincts (I still think this is at least a large minority of teachers) can do remarkably good work in the face of adversity so I think things tick over despite the system being dumb; expecting them to do this and not moan sometimes is a bit of a step too far. When Finland shows what can be done at the top end and most of Europe is ahead of us, it's ongoing madness to think our political meddling and 'making pigs fatter by weighing them more' inspection attitude is a good idea. Even some of the best teachers wilt in the end in the face of such nonsense and yes maybe they should leave then (I would too) but what would we do then to fill all the gaps?

In reply to Postmanpat:

Finding good heads has never been more difficult because the job is so very difficult and some good ones have been chopped down to daft Ofsted decisions (who inspects the inspectors?). The same problem exists in Hospital Trusts and numerous other organisations under extreme pressure (financial and or political).

In reply to neilh:






Absolutely. But there are very few teachers willing now to put up with the pressures of being a head so heads are now increasingly inexperienced and lacking the blls to do what the head in your example did. If a head isn't prepared to back the staff against the parents when reqd it becomes difficult to operate the school effectively.

In reply to Offwidth:


It's easy to oversimplify, especially when it comes to cherry picking other country's systems. Accountability reforms are slow coming, but there's a lot of misconceptions about the Finnish system and how you can compare it directly to the UK. For a start Finland as a whole has slightly more students than London (and FWIW London would very probably outperform Finland on PISA if you could filter the results - https://www.cfbt.com/~/media/cfbtcorporate/files/research/2014/r-london-sch...

"While Finland does not currently have an Ofsted-style inspection, it is entirely wrong to assert that education is not evaluated.... In essence, the accountability data in Finland is very similar to that in England. The difference resides in how it is used."

And...

"Thirty-seven per cent of pupils attend free schools in Helsinki and admission by test score dominates admissions to upper secondary education"

See here: http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/images/207376-finnish-fairy-stories-t...

FWIW quite a few of the pupil involved in the production of these reports are keen climbers... I think only one posts on here.

Regarding the illusory changes to standards - correct regarding the overstretched equivalences of some of the vocational qualifications (one of the first things Gove changed in 2010), but your conclusion about what should happen, is seemingly only sensible, if you oversimplify the problem. The opposite of "competing exam boards" has been proposed by the current government, and was discussed by Gove too, but never happened because... http://schoolsweek.co.uk/why-having-one-exam-board-isnt-smart-sounds-gibb-o...

Recruiting and retaining good heads is a huge issue where there's a lot of work to be done. There are the best group of graduates going into teaching at the moment, but we need to retain them and develop them, especially as the economy recovers.

In reply to Andy Morley:


Could you elaborate!

In reply to JR:

Finland has a population of 5.5 million. Its always dragged out as a good example, but really its not comparable. Better to look at Germany ( which I had read has similar issues to ourselves) or say Japan ( which follows an 11 plus style of education so I am told).

I think good head teachers are like good Hospital Trust Managers...gold dust.The govt should by now be capable of capturing them early and training them up.

In reply to DaveHK:

Saddened to hear you say that. My childrens' experiences of school has been fantastic. Really committed, caring teachers who have worked hard to make sure they have the best start in life. The system has complimented their work and I can only hope it yes better. Far far better experience than I had in school which was basically a 1980's war zone.

In reply to Offwidth:

Last year I gave up teaching after 13 years. I was at the top of my teaching scale, had previously been a Head of Department. I still really miss being in the classroom and working with the students. I was a successful teacher in terms of both results of the students that I taught but also on a more pastoral/supportive role. I cared massively about all of the students that I taught and wanted the best for all of them. My salary was £35000 (which I consider to be a good salary especially including the holidays) and now I work a full time job and earn just below £14000. I was lucky enough financially to be able to make the change. However, my life (apart from financially) is so much better. I worked all hours, spending more time caring about other people's children than that of my own children. Teaching is hard in the fact that I never felt that what I had done was good enough and I could no longer live with that feeling.

In reply to neilh:


Yup.. hence my point about London. Germany has similar issues. Not sure we want to model on the Japanese system, from a teaching hours POV


First sentence, yes, problem is you need over 25k of them if you want one for each school.

In reply to The New NickB:

Let me elaborate.

Andy has decided that everyone is the public sector is the same and that he is better than any of them.

In reply to XXXX:

Or perhaps that any large organisation develops and ethos, ways of thinking, common culture etc. If you fit in with this, it will be a comfortable place to work; if you don't, it won't. This is true of teaching and schools as much as anything else.

In reply to pec:

I agree (and this is not just teaching) that politicians should stay out of education. What's needed is what works, sustainably, for the long term, not whatever ideology is dominant this week. Same goes for health, justice, defence etc etc.

Perhaps a benevolent dictatorship would be preferable to tribalist careerist politicos?

In reply to Offwidth:


One of the changes I would make is reduce the admin burden on heads and ensure they actually do some teaching (even a small amount). John Tomsett discusses this in his book and I'm in agreement: How can we call them headteachers when many haven't been in the classroom for a very long time? I'd also ensure that a minimum of 1-hour each day of the head's time was spent just doing drop-in observations in lessons, so that they get to actually see what's happening on a day-to-day basis, rather than a glossed up lesson for an observation scheduled weeks in advance. This would mean they stay more in touch with what's possible in the classroom. Neither of these changes would cost money and I'm pretty sure they'd help improve the culture in schools, including teacher morale. being led by someone who you know is a great teacher and who shows a genuine interest in what you do hasn't been my experience in any of the schools in which I have worked. Instead, heads have foisted on staff loads of pointless, unachievable crap. Saying they're forced to do this by those above them doesn't wash with me. If they were more in touch with what happens in the classroom, then they'd know some of the stuff isn't achievable. If they actually had to comply with some of their own nonsense, then things would change pretty fast. Heads would need to be both great teachers to lead and inspire teachers, plus have good management skills to lead the school on other fronts. Surely, that skill combination wouldn't be that hard to find...? At the moment, from what I can see, many get there by accepting the BS and being yes people, agreeing to do stuff they know is wrong to work their way up through the ranks. Obviously, when they get there, they then expect others to do the same and not to try and change things or rock the boat too much.

I think forward thinking heads who are ready for new ideas and critical thinking about the system are quite a rare breed, unfortunately!

In reply to MG:

If he'd said that I'd have nodded. Although to claim the whole public sector has the same culture would have stretched it. But he didn't say that.

In reply to 1234None:

But surely you are just replacing one set of dirigiste guidelines with another? Why not give a broad set of outcomes that expected and let Heads sort out how?

In reply to 1234None:

From what I see, good Headteachers do the drop-in as a matter of course. Its not difficult to do. Any manager worth his /her salt in any business- private or public- would do that as standard. Most of these things are hardly management rocket science and do not require an edit from above.

In reply to neilh:

It doesn't happen as often as it should in the schools I have worked in. I'm talkin about an hour of each day taking a real interest in lessons...you think that's happening in a lot of schools?

In reply to Postmanpat:

Possibly...but it's the heads that are part of the problem in my view and not just the system in which they work...! If they're not forced to change then I don't think they will...

In reply to pec:

Unfortunately there have been several suicides, to my knowledge, in my area alone. You are spot on otherwise.

In reply to 1234None:

It isn't.

Personally I can tell if management are any good in a school not so much by them wandering into lessons, but by their presence on the corridors, on the gate at the beginning and end of the day, in the corners outside where the naughty kids hide. Some of them like to hide in nice quiet offices a bit too much for my liking.

In reply to Postmanpat:



I don't know. I've just started secondary teaching, 20+ years after leaving school myself and whilst kids are still kids, schools generally seem much less violent than when I was at school and bullying is taken way more seriously.

In reply to JR:



Very interesting! That looks rather like the comments I've been leaving below Guardian articles and the like extolling the perfection of the Finnish school system for the last decade! Doing my PGCE last year, in the uni lectures it seemed that Finland got at least on mention a lecture, normally with a somewhat inaccurate positive recounting of some aspect of the system.

And the Finnish economy is a disaster at the moment, so it seems that education system is failing in that Marxist sense of preparing pupils to contribute to a successful economic system.

In reply to 1234None:

I've put a number of posts on this thread and haven't much more to add without going round in circles so just one final thing. You know the old maxim that all teachers are teachers of English? Well it would be really good if you could start writing in paragraphs. I don't want to sound like a smartarse but it would make your posts much less daunting to read

In reply to pec:

Out of interest, then, how would you have paragraphed Peak DJ's post?

In reply to JR:

The same Tim Oates that steamrollered the curriculum review through in 2010 for Gove. I'd be careful taking what he says at face value how about some independant views. All his points seem aimed at leftist fantasies... Finland has exams and regulations and isn't perfect... no shit.

In reply to The New NickB:

I could, but it's a big subject! When you consider that the NHS alone employs over 1,300,000 people according to its own websites, the combined UK public sector is itself the size of a whole country like Finland. Any group of people that size that has a lot in common will have a culture that is instantly recognisable to outsiders, while at the same time having a considerable diversity amongst its members - we all recognise what is 'French' for instance, even though French society is made up of radically different groups. I could give you an analysis of the currents of thought and political ideas that I think are at play in the British public sector (my first degree was in politics) but that would be boring. Instead I'll suggest that you could listen to a few back numbers of a BBC Radio 4 sitcom called 'Clare in the Community' - though it's a parody, it's sometimes a surprisingly and frighteningly accurate depiction of some flavours of the public sector:
http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Comedy/Clare-in-the-Community-Audiobook/B00OZXQ...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01pf5c6

These clips aren't a great selection, but I know some climbers who are a lot like Clare!

In reply to pec:
Sincerest apologies. Typing on a kindle, so can only see about the last line of text!

Here's a new paragraph. In case you've been intimidated by the first line:
I don't want to sound like a smart arse, but I assumed you'd left school, and the amount of text in my post shouldn't have been that daunting to a reasonably well-educated adult. High expectations and all that

In reply to Offwidth:
With respect, you were expecting people on this thread to take what you said about Finland at face value.

Gove originally extolled about Finland in the way you did (see the 2010 DfE case for change doc), but many, Tim included I would assume, explained that the improvements of Finland had probably peaked. Improvements that came about via different policies (during a period of major reform in late 90s/early 00s) to those they have now. Naturally success of an education system reform is not measured immediately.

I don't disagree that there are things we can take away from Finland. Their centralised curriculum is one of the things they credit as creating their success in PISA (don't forget the steamrollered curriculum reform you mentioned was a centralising reform), but drawing oversimplified conclusions without taking them in cultural or economic context, is what causes the face-value politicking in the first place.

In reply to 1234None:

I would expect a head teacher( of a large school) to spend about half an hour a day wandering around the school and poking their nose into things and asking questions.This is about the time that if, you speak to managers of similar sizes bodies, they would naturally do..

Any more is probably micromanaging and counterproductive as they should be " running the school and involved in big issues".

In lessons I would expect them to have delegated this to one of their deputies, who should be capable of feeding back stuff to the head.

if its a small school, then clearly a different position should be adopted.

In reply to Andy Morley:
You might have to do better than referencing Clare in the Community, which isn't very accurate about Social Workers, even in an exaggerated parody type way, never mind of the public sector as a whole.

In reply to neilh:

Maybe what's needed then is a business and admin manager AND a headteacher. The headteacher should lead on teaching and learning...the clue being in the name.

In reply to 1234None:




We'll call that a score draw

In reply to JR:

Their way is also politics but its the politics of well qualified teachers respected by community and government to broadly just get on with their job. Its purely a side benefit the results they acheive on international tests compare well even with the drilled educational cultures of the east. Why on earth does Tim think they have peaked? I suggest he is struggling to see the wood for the trees... maybe just maybe the teachers can thrive because interference is much more limited. More deeply political, theirs is a comprehensive system and kids start late and learn at their own pace, things we are told by the conservative educational experts just don't work. In the UK too often ideology is dressed up as evidence (and all governments have been guilty). Why are we so afraid to enpower and trust teachers and heads when the evidence across europe shows things work better that way (rather than under the guise of seeling 'continuing improvement' imposing tight control and inspecting everyone to the edge of their sanity). Oh and do they send their kids to their experimental systems... rarely... they normally go to the comparably unfettered private system

In reply to The New NickB:


It's accurate as to the perception of aspects of the public sector by others - the way some public sector employees are perceived by the wider populace. Its popularity evidences that. Any integrated social phenomenon has its external as well as its internal reality.

It's also surprisingly accurate as a depiction of social workers. The reason I'm here in the first place is that the guy I used to climb with occasionally started doing what I thought was a pretty passable impression of C. in the C. one day in 2007 when he and I were cycling around the Goyt valley - he started lecturing me about how my calling the smallest of the front chainwheels on my bike a 'granny ring' was 'disrespectful to grandmothers'. I thought he was having a laugh and pointed out that I acquired the term from my wife's female cycling group, many of whom are grandmothers themselves. But humourless to a fault, he was unimpressed and I got a half-hour-long lecture on the subject which only ended when he finally noticed that I was (by then) completely ignoring him. Eight years later, I no longer climb with him, but the good news is that as a direct result of that, the circle of friends that I climb with has expanded no end. Not one of those people to whom I have described that and the subsequent chain of events think other than that he was a complete idiot, BUT, crucially, all of them recognise the phenomenon to the degree that they seem to find it more than credible and presumably are able to relate it in some way to their own experience.

Having worked extensively with social workers myself in the past and being married to someone who was one after a fashion in her youth, I'd say that it's by no means a-typical, though I admit to being taken a little by surprise on the day by how Clare-like it was. A kind of unconscious self-parody of social workers by a social worker...

In reply to Offwidth:


Undoubtedly they have a less market based approach though even Pasi is worried about their performance (not just due to PISA result)... and he's a clear opponent of the GERM - http://pasisahlberg.com/pasi-sahlberg-on-finlands-recent-pisa-results/

"Many in Finland believe that PISA saved Finland from reforms that would not have been good, either for teachers or the country. But these events, while staving off unhelpful reforms, created another problem, as I said earlier in this interview: All change in Finland, both good and bad, came to an end, and we lost our capacity to renew and adapt to a changing environment."

If all this of interest, keep an eye out (or even help Lucy with funding) for this:

https://unbound.co.uk/books/cleverlands
http://www.insideclassrooms.com

In reply to Andy Morley:

All n+1 stuff though isn't, I can do the same in abundance to show the contrary. As you admit it is perception, one that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

In reply to JR:

What a danger to have, dwarves our dangers eh !? If the system is flexible enough and the staff well qualified won't they drive change? Most of my links are second hand in the tech area but from what I'm told they seem ahead of us in the way innovation links into the teaching and industry (and tech is one area the UK does seem to be improving) .

On Tobys point on the economy.. their GDP per capita is pretty similar to the UK (just ahead?) which to me is not bad for such a small country of its history and especially given the UK is a trade hub and boosted massively by overseas banks taking advantage of our light reglulation and legal cover.

In reply to pec:


Indeed!

In reply to Offwidth:


You would hope so, but generally that's not been the case without the right (political or otherwise) catalysts.


At this point in time it is slightly more in Finland, though the UK measure has improved rapidly since 2013 (and with the same rise as last year will potentially overtake Finland). UK suffered much bigger drop in 2008, due to the the banks being here, but Finland has not really made that sustained recovery. That's my take on it, I'm sure Toby knows more.

In reply to 1234None:

Its a bit old fashioned to think of them as head teachers for the big High Schools.They are running and managing big budgets and teams of people. To think of them as "admin" or " teachers" is just not right any more.

Granted that maybe the case in small primary schools. But if you are the in charge of say 2,000 students and 200 plus teachers, then your main function is not being a teacher.

To expect such a person to spend an hour in class every day is probably a waste of their time.That is why they should delegate.

They need to have an overview on everything.That is a valuable skill set.

In reply to The New NickB:


Scrutiny is good, particularly if it is evidence-based. My experience of the public sector is that it is in a Rationalist tradition as opposed to an Empiricist tradition, and that public-sector rationalist scrutiny is usually based on a core set of unverifiable assumptions.

The central premise of 'Clare' is:
"Clare Barker, the social worker with all the politically correct jargon but none of the practical solutions,"
There's certainly an awful lot of that in large swathes of the public seector. As my father confided in me in the days when he was the head of a large handicraft department in a Secondary Modern school:
"Those who can, do, those who can't, teach"
He was an eminently practical man as well as a schoolteacher, and I reckon he was onto something there...

In reply to XXXX:


If you want to get to grips with subject-matter like this, you need to get your head around the concept of 'a culture'.

Almost any social grouping will have its cultures and sub-cultures which are concrete and observable social phenomena. Cultures are not uniform - there is considerable variation within most of them but at the same time most of the people who are part of a culture still demonstrate various traits which make them instantly recognisable to others.

In reply to Andy Morley:


Sorry I mistook you for someone with something to contribute.

In reply to The New NickB:


Typical schoolteacher response! (regardless of whether you are one or not)

What you have to realise is that while sarcasm may terrify 11-year-olds, it leaves most grownups unimpressed.

In reply to Andy Morley:

No I'm not a teacher, but you obviously like labelling. I think I might be picking up a theme here.


I don't appear to be dealing with a grown up. Parroting the idiotic line about "those who can do" proves that. Anyway it's not sarcasm, I was interested in hearing your thesis, but it turned out is was bollocks.

I suspect Irk's initial analysis was correct.

In reply to The New NickB:


So is it your belief that organisations and institutions don't possess characteristic cultures?

In reply to Andy Morley:

Are you capable of original thought? Or do you just believe everything your dad told you?

It's a shame as you occasionally post things worth reading and then you post that shite.

In reply to The New NickB:


Labelling is central to our use of language and without it any form of human civilisation would simply fall apart. The key point is not whether you do or don't label but whether you label intelligently, and can support your labelling with some kind of evidence.

This conversation is indeed suggestive of a theme - that public sector culture might be subject to formative and normative constraints that may be generalisable across different public-sector domains. Your profile suggests you might be in Town Planning. My own recent experience of planning officials is of applying for planning permission for an extension to my house, of negotiating changes to the design between my architect, the planning officer and my neighbours that, we thought, almost guaranteed that permission would be granted. However, on a whim of the planning official's boss and to everyone's surprise, it was refused.

We appealed and won. OK, it cost me an extra grand that I could have better spent elsewhere, but at the end of the day it was just an irritation which we overcame and then we moved on. But I can well see that a professional lifetime spent causing such minor irritations and then getting squished might well make that kind of work environment a rather depressing place. The same probably applies to anyone else who occupies a position of minor authority, be it over 11-year-olds or over unsuspecting council-tax payers. People in that sort of position probably experience various professional frustrations that may spill over into their personal life, and those who choose to respond to it in a negative way will find all sorts of ways of deriving perverse satisfaction, whether it's through the exercise of sarcasm in the classroom or elsewhere, or through sabotaging the legitimate plans of ordinary people trying to go about their day-to-day lives.

This isn't just my individual gripe though against teachers or planners. A quite well-connected architect I know who wasn't involved in my house extension said that for the year or two in the run-up to my application, planning officers had a reduced workload due to a slump in the building industry and were therefore deliberately making work for themselves by turning down a greater than usual number of applications. Perverse logic and behaviour often appears to be the norm in bureaucracies and hierarchies, but to come back to my point, it's probably a lot more depressing for those who make a career out of such things than it is for the rest of us who have to endure their behaviour from time to time.

In reply to JR:
Well I've been told by my links of evidence of teacher driven good practice in nearly all the European countries they work with, including Finland, that seemingly are done less well in the UK and then usually as extra curricula. I will happily admit I completely distrust the whole idea of political catalysts being the primary driver of educational change... its too slow... too open to bias.. too easy to miss subject differences and where its really needed it usually indicates repair of a system failure.

On the economy front I'm not interested in the fiddly bits in the last few years. the level of per capita GDP of many European countries should be a shock to Brits who see themselves as superior to most of Europe when in fact we rely heavily on the banks and trade and the service industry to meet par. I'd expect Finland to do worse than the UK recently as their output was more manufacturing export linked, so more vulnerable to recessions and euro austerity.

In reply to Offwidth:

Europe is a stagnating economy, probably slowly dying and no longer masters of all it surveys.So why on earth are you bothered about Europe, what about fast growing Asia. Surely we should be more global in our outlook for education. After all that is what our children will be dealing with and ,I hate to say it, competing with.So why not compare us with Singapore etc etc.

In reply to Postmanpat:

I'm not totally against the principle, although I suspect it is overplayed. That is of course why I asked Andy to elaborate.

In reply to Andy Morley:
Your architect friend very definitely hasn't got a clue what he is talking about, I'm sure most of his architect colleagues will tell him that the problem is there generally aren't enough planning officers to handle the applications.

I'm not a planning officer in the sense you understand it, not that it is really relevant.

Your cod psychology is getting quite tiresome.

In reply to neilh:

We have no clear idea where our main competition will be in the future and in any case to me education is a lot more than training a workforce for an economy. Having said that I've worked a bit in Singapore for my Uni and hear a lot of good things about Singapore education in general and am glad it's featured in Lucy's book (linked by JR above) so good practice can spread.

In reply to The New NickB:


Strangely, he quoted an article in whatever is the main journal of his profession, telling me that this was how he knew about this particular development. But as to your point 'there aren't enough planning officers' - that is, pretty much the litany of the public sector across all domains. Generally, you always seem to want there to be more of you.

In reply to Andy Morley:

No, the market downturned, Council's with huge cuts to find reduced numbers of planning officers, then found they could not cope when application numbers increased and the government also required them to do more. I'm sure it is common across many sectors.

Most RIBA members will agree with that, plenty have gone to print saying just that.

In reply to The New NickB:


Do you think there are any cultural characteristics which are more prevalent in the public sector?

In reply to The New NickB:


It's a typical reaction to cyclical variations in demand in the private sector too. Private sector corporations and companies will downsize, overdo it and then have to employ freelance contractors to make up the shortfall, months and sometimes weeks later ( ) - sometimes they may even re-employ people they just made redundant as contractors. In both private and public sectors, there may be a situational pressure on employees who see these thigns coming to engage in spontaneous 'makework' campaigns to help manipulate perceptions. However, having worked in both sectors, I'm pretty certain that people are much more likely to get away with this in the public sector, as my architect friend, supported by his professional journal, suggested. Generally speaking when people try that game in the private sector they get found out, usually sooner rather than later whereupon short is their shrift....

In reply to Postmanpat:


Do you? I think I would struggle without covering tired and generally inaccurate cliches, but everyone has different experiences.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I thought you said you liked to evidence your labelling.

In reply to Offwidth:


Best make sure everyone gets behind this then...
http://www.claimyourcollege.org


Hmmm, not really sure the point you're making, or that I agree it would be a shock. I'm not sure Brits do see their economy as superior these days, but they probably did up to 2008 when UK was in the top tier. Over what time scale are you interested? We've almost always been roughly equivalent with Finland, except in the fiddly bits in the last few years and a blip in the late 80s.

In reply to The New NickB:


I can't provide the journal reference if that's what you're after. But then, this is an informal discussion on UKC, not an academic paper.

In reply to Father Noel Furlong:

_Father_ Noel Furlong said:


Priceless!

In reply to Andy Morley:


That isn't my point. It's use of terms like "I'm pretty certain" to support your unsubstantiated prejudices.

In reply to Andy Morley:

Thank you

Unfortunately given the inconsistency in your posts I'm unclear as to whether you're being serious or sarcastic.

But you acknowledged my reply so I'll at least see that as a positive.

In reply to JR:

How do you explain their economic success with limited natural resources and butt up against the Russian border for so many years. We had the The City, oil, the best industrially exploitable research in the world, a huge trade and industrial history and partly due to that loads of old accumulted wealth. Why not ask a few people and see (my depressing experience in the UK is all too often you have to explain what GDP per capita is first)?

In reply to The New NickB:


All knowledge is contingent and probabilistic. I'm just being honest in my own assessment of levels of probability in assertions I make. Someone writing a piece of quantitative scientific research would do no more nor less - where they might write "p = 0.0047", I select my terminology to suit the conversational medium.

In reply to Offwidth:


My limited knowledge of it is that when the soviet union collapsed, it fell into a major recession, as it was their major export client (being butt up against was pretty helpful). It recovered mainly due to the success of Nokia (one big company, one small country). It doesn't have oil but its resources relatively aren't that limited, it does have minerals and lots of trees, and it's happy to make lots of paper out of them... Now the service industry represents the primary chunk of its economy and is of comparable % size to that of the UK.

Actually what you're really saying is, how do you explain the UK's position to be so low... When we had the The City, oil, the best industrially exploitable research in the world, a huge trade and industrial history and partly due to that loads of old accumulated wealth?

I'm sure many people wouldn't give you technical definition of "GDP per capita", but most wouldn't be too far wrong if you asked it as "how's our economic growth looking, and how's it doing compared to other countries", which is in effect (in simplistic terms) what the measure tells you. Would all the Finns you ask understand GDP per capita

Anyhow, we're well off topic...

In reply to Andy Morley:



I'm sorry, but having read this and your other posts I have to believe you are some kind of parody account a la a rather opinionated pseud's corner. How's the existential scrambling?

FWIW I've worked in the Civil Service in a relatively high profile department and then in the comparable private industry. I thought the people in what was the Department of Energy did a good job on extremely limited resources despite the changing whims of politicians

In reply to wbo:


So you don't understand the way 'scientific' evidence is presented? Don't worry, nor do most other people. I only mentioned it because someone else did.

In reply to Offwidth:


Finland's last (IIRC 2013) PISA scores were poor, at least in comparison to past performance. There has been a huge discussion in government, media and amongst educational professionals as to what is happening. Through the 90s and Naughties governments, both SDP- and Keskusta-led really flogged Finnish education internationally as part of the interminable "Finland Image" discourse. There was a lot of egg on faces when the scores fell off, but I guess if you live by the PISA score/sword you die by the PISA score/sword. There has also been at least one book published this year by a teacher that seems to set out to "puncture the myth"; it certainly attracted lots of media attention.

In reply to Andy Morley:

Could you give us the P value for "I'm pretty certain". Thanks.

In reply to Offwidth:


The Finnish economy is shockingly depressing at the moment. The government is pushing more and more austerity not only in the public sector, but more widely because of the tripartite structure of the economy where everything is agree on between the employers, unions and govt. The collapse of Nokia hasn't only meant a glut of unemployed technical specialists http://yle.fi/uutiset/employment_oversupply_leads_professionals_to_learn_ne... but it really hurt the country's psyche - national champions and all that. There are still a lot of conspiracy theories (normally about how the Americans wanted to bring Nokia down) that you hear. Lots of people don't want to hear that leaders of the company, which whilst not worth quite as much as the City is to UK GDP was getting there as part of Finnish GDP, could have made such huge strategic errors.

In reply to Offwidth:

My wife has been teacher for 8 years and is ready to jack it in.
She loves teaching but the pressures are too much.she has been of with stress and it cant be helped for it to affect her home life.

Teachers are ridiculously under appreciated

In reply to TobyA:
Only a moron would judge an education system by PISA scores. In any case they dropped from pretty much top place to mearly near the top (the best in europe and and still well ahead of the UK).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012

There are various sites you can directly compare GDP per capita, like here:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/finland/gdp-per-capita

In reply to Offwidth:


That would put many a writer from the Guardian, BBC and Atlantic Monthly in that category then, having read or seen numerous reports in the (normally centre or centre-left) Anglophone media for well over a decade that did pretty much that for Finland. I'm sure I've said this before that the Ministry for Foreign Affairs set up a unit just to deal with requests for education visits after the early PISA successes - so many people wanted to go to Helsinki and see how the the schools worked.

In reply to Offwidth:
GDP per capita is pretty blunt instrument, Finnish average incomes will be much closer to that figure than in the UK because of the great disparities of wealth here. Then again, costs of living are lower here, mainly it would seem because of more competitive markets. But in terms of business environment, the UK seems so much easier. We had mates visiting this weekend - another Finno-Anglo couple - who like us moved from Finland last year and now run a business here, they were explain just how hard they found it was to start a business in Finland, and how much easier it is here, just due to things like tax and pension regulations. GDP per capita doesn't tell us that much useful really, at least not between advanced European countries.

In reply to TobyA:

What on earth happened to that balanced intelligent commentator that was 'light from the north'. I get as pissed off as anyone by lazy jounalism but show me one Guardian or BBC reporter who judged Finnish education just on PISA. PISA made people notice, the bit the lefties found and love and overstated was more the comprehensive and relaxed bit, they don't beleive in PISA type tests.

In reply to TobyA:
Seems to me if Finland has a flatter distribution it means the median GDP per capita will be even higher cf the UK. The ability to start a business is an even blunter instrument (albeit one I would I'd like to see improved even in the UK). The US is a great place to start a buisness cf the UK but a terrible place to be if it fails. Are your costs of living numbers including rents and or morgages?

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp

In reply to The New NickB:


Probably, yes. Not having worked in the public sector I can only go on what I read and what my friends and acquaintances who do or have tell me. What they describe is often bizarre in my eyes (and theirs) and statistically it seems unlikely that I happen to know a particular minority that work in such places. Which is noty to say ythat privat sector organisations don't have many failings, but they do generally seem to be different ones.

In reply to Offwidth:

For cost of living I remember that in Finland it was EU figures on disposable income that were much talked about a couple of years ago. Not sure if housing costs were put in those or not.

My point about starting businesses was more just building upon yours about country's needing to link Education systems to the economy - clearly the Finnish school system does educate the vast majority of young Finns to a very good level, but it is then considerably harder for people to take their knowledge, skills and enthusiasm and go and start their own businesses - be that a high tech start up or local cafe.

I remember clearly listening to a BBC news report on the Today programme perhaps 6 or 7 years ago reporting on the 'miracle' of Finnish schools based on PISA ranking. I was driving down to my nan's in South London at the time while over from Helsinki for Xmas. The reporter did a supposed vox pop of parents outside a school gate on why they thought Finland got such scores, the 'random mum' who spoke happened to be a mate of mine! But not only was she someone I knew, she was also at the time the head the British Council in Finland! So much for the shoe leather journalism. I can easily see why people are so attracted to the system (particularly British teachers) but the reporting makes it very attractive.

The now sadly departed but longtime éminence grise of Finnish diplomacy, Max Jakobson, once wrote back in the Cold War days: "Finland is forever at the mercy of the itinerant columnist who after lunch and cocktails in Helsinki is ready to pronounce himself upon the fate of the Finnish people. A person visiting, say, London for the first time, who does not know English and has only a vague notion of the significance of Dunkirk or the role of Winston Churchill, would hardly be regarded as qualified to comment on the British scene today.” My feeling after having had kids in Finnish schools, chairing a PTA, having a number of mates who teach in Finland, and even doing some substitute teaching in a Helsinki school myself, is much could be said about writing over the last decade on Finnish education.

Anyways, that's enough Nordic reminiscing. I need to finish planning lessons for tomorrow and drink enough wine to help me forget that I need to mark something like 150 books this weekend. Still, I managed two hours of soloing at Stanage last friday night before sunset and that weekend's marking started, so it's sort of alright.

In reply to Postmanpat:

Isn't "the public sector" a bit like say "the private sector"? I wouldn't expect a German banker working in Canary Warf to have similar views to a local coffee shop owner in North Yorkshire or Bristolian light engineering entrepreneur. Likewise should we expect a Devonian Teaching assistant, the Chief Executive of Dundee's social services and hospital consultant in Cambridge to have some shared perspective?

In reply to TobyA:

I think that whilst they may have lots of different views they might also share, or rather "go along with" some shared culture. The obvious one is that in the private sector the ultimate aim of the organisation is to make a profit. Some employees may not like this but nowadays they will generally recognise that it is crucial to how the company works and their position in it or even whether they have a position within it. That surely creates a different culture to the public sector in which that is not the case and there are other raison d'etres which influence the culture.

One might say that sports teams tend to have a shared culture for example that winning is an ultimate goal whether it be football, rugby cricket or whatever. That culture will be different to, for example , charities. That does not mean that all sports teams are the same or all charities are the same.

In reply to Postmanpat:

I've worked in various bits of both public and private sector, but for most of my career and certainly in more senior roles as been exclusively local government. I don't pretend on that experience to be able to categorise 5m public workers and 20m private sector works, or whatever the correct figure is. I can talk about my experiences, those of my friends and colleagues and maybe a little from academic work and trade publications. I am interested in other peoples experiences, but not so much the lazy stereotypes. I have stories of strange behaviour in public sector organisations, but just as many in from the private sector. I am interested in other people's perceptions.

In reply to The New NickB:

>I am interested in other peoples experiences, but not so much the lazy stereotypes. I have stories of strange behaviour in public sector organisations, but just as many in from the private sector. I am interested in other people's perceptions.
>
But how do you distinguish "lazy stereotypes" from "other peoples' experiences" and the perceptions that both creates?

In reply to Postmanpat:


Well not writing things like "those who can do, those who can't teach" is a good starting point. More seriously, explaining why rather than just stating that something is, will get me interested.

In reply to The New NickB:
Andrew Morley said that.

In reply to Wicamoi:


Lol. It's a matter for qualitative thematic research based on an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the lived experience of xyz minority and the intersubjectivity of all things.

This is Pseud's Corner signing off for the evening.

Goodnight Ladies!

In reply to TobyA:


I remember those days well! If it helps (obviously the wine will too!) after 4-5 years I now don't do much planning in the sense I used to. I've taught most of the topics in my subject area before and I've sort of built up a bank of tweakable activities that work that can be slotted in wherever needed. Having laptops or tablets in the classroom helps me too, as it makes it so much easier to differentiate without too much advance planning. Apps like baiboard and explain everything are amazing and facilitate outstanding teaching with close to zero planning. Kids can research more advanced questions or make video tutorials summarising their learning etc. I now spend less than a couple of hours planning for a whole week of lessons.

As for the marking it has taken me a long time to learn that the more often I look at every student's work, the easier it is. I also tend to do a lot of feedback while the kids are working on a task. Walking round with the red pen writing the occasional target in a book to back up verbal feedback means I get credit during book inspections and all those other daft exercises, for all the verbal feedback given in lessons. I have negotiated with management to actually mark on my timetable slots for marking each class books every week. They have given these free periods a sort of "protected" status, so that I don't get shafted with meetings or cover in those periods. If I stick to the plan I can get everything done in working hours and take nothing home, ever. If I'm asked to attend meetings or do cover etc in those periods, the books don't get done that week and I don't mark the backlog that builds up.

A massive investment over the last few years in trying to make the kids quite independent in their learning and fostering good relationships/behaviour has also helped massively, as from about year 7 the kids will now get on with a task without much teacher intervention for periods of up to 45 minutes, so I can manage to speak to individuals who need support during that time and give them some targets for improvement. Having the same classes to teach a few years on the run helps, as then you get the benefit of all the work you've put in to make it easier with that group of kids.

I guess in summary, I'm saying that with smart working and a couple of years work up front, in my view it does get easier and I struggle to see at times why so many who've been in the profession for years have to take so much work home. There is a lot of BS asked of teachers under the UK system, but after a year or two there are ways to deal with it other than just accepting the mountains of work. For me it's about problem solving and critical thinking...finding ways to make it work for the students and questioning anything that doesn't add value in terms of learning. Lots of teachers do struggle with that and jump through hoops, take on everything that's thrown out them without ever questioning and suggesting improvements, then moan about the workload. That's exactly the approach i don't want from kids, yet many teachers can't model the kinds of behaviours we are apparently expected to develop in younger people.

In reply to 1234None:
Maybe you're an outstanding teacher... not everyone can be that despite the political bullshit that says they can.


In reply to TobyA

Thank goodness, you haven't been taken over by an alien force after all. Classic Toby post

Your Vox pox BBC reporter is annoying and far from uncommon but its as much to do with real journalism as some of the caricatures of teaching we see on these threads being representative of the profession as a whole.

In reply to Postmanpat

Interestingly a lot of the public sector organisations these days needs to make a nominal profit: sometimes a requirement of the monitoring bodies, sometimes to afford any reinvestment (eg most Unis). When you look at the overlap from both ends with 'not for profits' I think the old labels have completely blurred. Given the interchange of management cross-sector, cultures there are also very blurred. My previous VC moved to us from Mars and two other senior managers at Pork Farms (much to the delight of some academic satirists) and the majority of our governers have been private sector, including a way back one of Maggies favorite industrial 'cut and union slashers'.

In reply to Offwidth:
>
Which raises the question of why private sector people and incentives are being transferred to the public sector.

No doubt there is an overlap but I still struggle to envisage line managers in a private sector company spending a 90 minute meeting discussing how they should word the offer of a disabled parking space to attendees at a forthcoming event. (Apparently "disabled" was discriminatory or something . They came up with "special requirements" and thus received lots of requests for vegetarian food etc but not for disabled parking spaces).

In reply to Postmanpat:

I'm an engineer with engineering pals and they despair at times about nonsense in the private sector and there is even a classic cartoon series called Dilbert to laugh through their frustrations.

http://dilbert.com

Its even got a bad practice principal to beware of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

In reply to Offwidth:



I used to be a great fan of Dilbert but don't see it much now. I am not pretending that there isn't a lot of managementspeak bollocks in the private sector. It's just that from what I read and am told it seems to be slightly different bollocks to that in the public sector.

In reply to Offwidth:
I do the best I can during the hours I am willing to commit to the job, and no more. That is all anyone can do.

If outstanding means an ability to leave out superfluous bullshit, say no to some of the BS meetings and initiatives occasionally (even when it may upset the apple cart) and find smarter ways of working...then yes, I've had to develop those skills to give the kids the best I can. Sadly, none of those things are currently mentioned in the criteria for outstanding teaching, even when they're essential to do a good job.

Any changes have to come from teachers and others in schools. If workload is excessive, do less, say no to some stuff or find smarter ways of working. Leaving the profession isn't going to solve the problems, but trying to change it from within just might help.

In reply to 1234None:

If doing what you do the kids like you and are doing well what else would you call it ?

In reply to Postmanpat:

Really?... VW US just blamed two software engineers.... imagine the powers those pesky engineers have hiding such a secret for so long. Hollywood must be on their tails ... best revenge story in decades, presumably?

In reply to Offwidth:


I'm not sure what point you're making or you think i was making.

In reply to Postmanpat:
Only the modern relevance of Dilbert (Horn is almost method acting the Dilbert manager) and the staggering incompetance of the senior management in one of the worlds major private sector corporations. Another recent example is the stuff coming out about Brooke's management style in the recent journalists trial. I think public and private and any other form of sector in the worlds globalised economy sometimes illustrate major governance issues around cultures of silence linked to management problems. Too many people attracted to power have to get there own way and don't like to be shown up. Any other UK public sector commonality not in the private sector seems to me to be a myth or have contra-examples depending on the many varieties of sub cultures.

In reply to Offwidth:


Yes, but that I'm not disputing that. Nobody doubts that private sector organisations can go horribly wrong.

In reply to Postmanpat:


I once went for an interview with a company called 'Worldcom'. I didn't like it there, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, and was relieved I didn't get the contract. A few years later, I understood why when I read the news / scancal about MCI - along with Enron, it was one of the kind of scams that prompted the US Sarbanes-Oxley act.

When that sort of job-creation scheme gets uncovered in the private sector, it gets labelled as 'corruption' and its discovery prompts legislation to prevent it. When not dissimilar things go on in the public sector, they don't need false accounting to cover them up - they are legitimised as 'anti-austerity' measures of the kind advocated by Jeremy Corbyn and by recent Greek governments, and people actually believe they are adopting the moral high-ground when, as with the Greek Government, they make accounting decisions that are every bit as unviable in the long term as anything that World Com did. It would probably be the same with Corbyn if he got elected.

That's one of the differences between public and private sectors - public sector ideologies often make a virtue out of spending more than you earn whereas in general, in business it's seen as an aberration.

In reply to Offwidth:

Therein lies the paradox. The country which embraces capitalism catches VW out. The social democracies fail( the EU).

That is what I love about the USA.

In reply to Andy Morley:





This is nonsense. Some of the best teachers I know, those teachers who are the most loved by the school's pupils and also the most effective, hate their positions. They don't hate the job that they do (in fact they love it) they hate the position that they find themselves in.

Education is a political football. Teachers are a convenient whipping-boy. Arguments that include the phrase 'well of course, in the private sector things are twice as bad' seem to lack authenticity, empathy or thought. In fact I find them offensive. Race to the bottom, anyone?

Pec's points about teachers loving a moan is spot on - he is also correct about the unions. In all of the time that teachers have been observing 'action short of strike action' not one f**king teacher anywhere actually followed these rules. That's because the majority of us love to teach but hate careerist robots who have to click their heels to the commands of their jack-booted DfE masters.

In reply to Morty:


I can't help but be amused by your calling what I've said here 'nonsense' before going on to repeat some of the things I've said in this and my other posts. What I've said above is that hating what you do is no excuse for being a poor teacher because everyone in that situation has a choice in how they respond to it. I even went on to point to the example of my own father who though he was disenchanted with 'the system' still chose to engage with his pupils to the extent that they still remember and respect him to this day.

This makes me wonder if comprehension might not perhaps be your strongest point, and also, what part those who taught you might have played in that?