#oneaday Day 691: Satisfactory is Unacceptable

It’s been a while since I had a teaching-related rant, but this article helpfully reminded me why I’m in no hurry to go back, despite being currently out of a job.

Any profession where it’s considered unacceptable to be graded “satisfactory” is not a profession I want to work in. And I’d argue it’s a profession that’s in need of a good shakeup.

Where do these rankings come from? OfSTED, or the Office for Standards in Education if you’re unfamiliar and/or foreign. Every so often, a school gets a bunch of inspectors descend upon the place to nose around everything it’s up to. As part of this process, inspectors drop in to a number of lessons for 15-20 minutes and then assign an arbitrary grade to the lesson, branding it anywhere between “Inadequate” (4) and “Outstanding” (1). These grades are also applied to other areas in the school, such as behaviour, “value for money” (i.e. how well the school is budgeting and spending what money it gets from the local authority) and numerous other factors.

Fine. I get the need to inspect places and ensure they’re doing their job. What I don’t get is the inconsistency in OfSTED’s approach. 15-20 minutes observation of one lesson is not enough to understand how well a teacher teaches. That teacher might have the worst class in the world, and may have scored a major victory on that day simply by having them sat down and listening for once. But if the children aren’t deemed to be “learning anything”, then BAM! That’s an “inadequate” mark right there.

Or it might not be — it may well be a “satisfactory” grade, depending on what else happens.

Now, the word “satisfactory” carries certain assumptions with it. Namely, it implies that the person declaring something to be “satisfactory” is somehow satisfied with the thing in question. While something that is “satisfactory” is not the best thing in the world, it’s certainly acceptable and does what it is supposed to.

Not in teaching. “Satisfactory” is somehow seen as a bad thing, despite the standards for branding lessons as “good” or “outstanding” being 1) completely arbitrary and largely down to the opinion of the inspector rather than specific, measurable criteria and 2) extremely difficult to attain, even for the most talented teachers. And if you’re in a difficult school teaching a difficult class, God help you.

New head of OfSTED Sir Michael Wilshaw is aiming to do away with the “satisfactory” branding and replacing it with “grade 3”. Not only that, he’s proposing that automatic pay rises for teachers whose work is considered “satisfactory” should cease, instead being reserved for those graded “good” or better.

This would be fine if the grading of a teacher was based on more than a short, not necessarily representative observation of part of a lesson. Actually, would it? If you’re doing your job, wouldn’t you expect a pay rise every so often? It’s been that way in teaching for some time now, with yearly pay rises for your first few years on the job before you have to go through a procedure known as “Threshold” to get on to the upper pay scale. The demands for meeting Threshold are pretty stringent, so some teachers won’t get through anyway — surely that’s enough control on pay rises?

(Note: I haven’t been teaching for a while, so pay systems may have changed since then. The above is how I understood it when I was employed by the system.)

Perhaps most obnoxious, however, is Sir Michael’s quote where he noted that “if anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you will know you are doing something right.”

Sorry, Sir Michael, but this is where you lost any credibility with me whatsoever. You should not be actively trying to sap morale — an OfSTED inspection is already an incredibly stressful experience. I know — I’ve been through two, including one whose result caused the school to go in to Special Measures (essentially meaning that it gets re-inspected on a much more regular basis than normal, and is at serious risk of closure). They weren’t pleasant experiences, so to imply that your staff should be encouraging a lack of morale among struggling teachers is pretty shameful.

Teaching is the most stressful job I’ve ever had. It drove me to a nervous breakdown, such was the stress of everything I had to think about at once coupled with torrents of abuse from hormonal, uncooperative teenagers. Sometimes you can use all the “strategies” in the book and nothing works with a difficult class or a particularly uncooperative child. Sometimes the behaviour of a pupil does disrupt the flow of a lesson. Should that be blamed on the teacher if the teacher in question does everything they’re allowed to do to prevent the situation from escalating further? If the teacher in question is having difficulty dealing with particular pupils, should that teacher be supported or vilified?

I think you know the answer to that one.

So in short, then, I’m not sorry I left teaching. And if this is the way that the regulatory body for teaching is going, then I want absolutely no part of it whatsoever. Teaching should be about inspiring children to do great things; to teach them about the world; to encourage them to try new things, and to expand their knowledge of the things they know. It shouldn’t be about meeting arbitrary criteria and being judged by people with no sense of context. And it certainly shouldn’t be about being deliberately demoralised by the people supposedly regulating the profession.

Good luck to anyone entering the educational system at the moment. You’re going to need it, from the sound of things.

One A Day, Day 21: Fantasy Feedback

So, that was the weekend. It went by far too quickly for my liking, but at least it was calm, relaxing and completely stress-free. If only things could be like that all the time, it would be lovely.

Of course, I haven’t “achieved” very much this weekend (unless you count my promotion to Lieutenant Commander in Star Trek Online) but sometimes it’s nice to not think about whether or not you should be doing something more important. There is plenty of time for stress in the week, because believe me, it always finds you.

I have one more week until the week-long half-term vacation from school. After that, it really is counting down the weeks and days until my escape. Once I get to that point, I will be past caring. If the school inspectors turn up to judge me inadequate during those last few weeks, they will get a piece of my mind.

They probably won’t, of course, because I’m far too much of a pussy to stand up to people in most cases, but it’s the thought that counts.

Or maybe I should say something. As I’ve said in a number of previous entries, teachers suffer in silence all the time. They nod and smile when another item is put on their personal “To-Do” lists without their permission, they grin and bear it when new “initiatives” are launched (and inevitably prove to be completely useless), they fill out their stupid pointless paperwork and then they go and moan in the staffroom. It’s the way of things. But I find myself wondering exactly what would happen if someone were to break that barrier and answer back to an OfSTED inspector.

Maybe it might go something like this:

INSPECTOR: Would you like some feedback from that lesson?

TEACHER: No. No I wouldn’t. Goodbye.

INSPECTOR: I really think you should have some feedback from that lesson.

TEACHER: I, on the other hand, do not. Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.

INSPECTOR: Your starter was satisfactory and had the children enga-

TEACHER: Are you deaf as well as stupid? I said no.

INSPECTOR: …the children were engaged. However, during your input-

TEACHER: Oh, we’re going to do this, are we? All right then. Input? It’s called “teaching”. Or even “talking”. Have you forgotten?

INSPECTOR: During your input, I would have liked to see more being taught.

TEACHER: Oh. Sorry. There I was thinking I was singing a song. Not… what’s that word for that thing I do when I’m standing at the front… Oh right, teaching.

INSPECTOR: However, there was a lot of you talking. It would have been nice to-

TEACHER: So I didn’t teach enough, but I talked too much. Right. Do carry on. This is fascinating.

INSPECTOR: It would have been nice to see the children say a little more on the subject.

TEACHER: They don’t know anything about the subject. That’s why I said it was a “new topic”. They seemed to understand that. Didn’t you?

INSPECTOR: As a result, the children didn’t make enough progress in that lesson.

TEACHER: Not enough progress? All right. How are you measuring that? Where is your magic “progress-o-meter” that measures how far the children progressed in the twenty minutes out of the hour you came and observed? I bet you have one. I bet it produces charts and graphs and syncs with Microsoft Excel, doesn’t it? Mmmm, Excel. You love Excel, don’t you? With its charts and its numbers and its ABJECT FUCKING TEDIUM. Just like you really.

INSPECTOR: So therefore, I am going to have to rate that lesson as inadequate.

TEACHER: Will it still be inadequate if I punch you in the neck?

INSPECTOR: What? Yes!

TEACHER: Well, it doesn’t matter, then. (punches Inspector in the neck) This is my most inadequate punch, bitch! You wouldn’t want to see my Outstanding one, or even my Good one!

Oh, what a wonderful experience that would be.

The sad thing about that fantasy exchange is that the things I quoted the Inspector as saying are the exact things they do say. Utter nonsense, non?