Teaching: a socially mobile career?

Or: winding the web

I don’t know if you know, but I moved house about three months ago (I am trying not to go on about it too much). Due to the demands of a punishing commute on the part of the hubs, we have uprooted ourselves from the town that was our home for almost seventeen years and plonked ourselves thirty miles away and into the next county. It has not been easy.

As well as leaving behind family and friends, and going to a place where we know no-one (or I don’t, so that effectively adds up to the same thing), we have remortgaged and found ourselves in the unenviable position of living in a smaller, more expensive house. We have had to chuck out a whole load of stuff (one of the side effects of living in a big old lady of a house is that there is no need to throw anything away, ever), buy a whole load of new, smaller stuff, and committed ourselves to paying off such a large debt that we will never be able to help out our rapidly growing children, should they decide to do what we did and take up the offer of a higher education.

On the face of it, R and I could be the poster children of social mobility. Born out of the Second World War, our parents were all the first in their families to go to college. Most of them, from working class roots, made it up the ladder to teaching positions, home ownership and a different kind of life altogether to the one that their own parents experienced. My parents moved away too, adding a geographical distance to the mix.

As a good friend of mine explained to me, on her return from a three year stint in the States, they had the opportunity to reinvent themselves, to become persons unfettered by other people’s expectations of their backgrounds, wiping away accents and enjoying the opportunity to be a new self. If you don’t have roots, if there aren’t people around who remember the day you were born, your awkward teenage years and that terrible cough you had the Christmas you were the narrator of the school play, it’s easy.

But here’s the thing. Roots, community, family, friendship; these things are important. Without them, we are a little lost unit, making our way in an uncertain, lonely fashion. Without the patriarchal model, where one person goes out to work and the other stays at home to run the kids about to their various bits and pieces, to spend the time not only running the household, but weaving the social web, the one that stands in for you when your family cannot, it’s, truth be told, a struggle. Politicians and the like, who like to talk about social mobility do so only in economic terms, as if ‘lifting yourself out of poverty’ is the only thing that matters.

Maybe that’s why so many people from working class backgrounds, when they graduate, turn to teaching. You don’t have to rip your family apart in order to get on. If you’re lucky you can enjoy the long holidays and the artificial sense of gentility they bring, so long as you don’t rub it in the noses of your wider family (in which case, it probably is better to move away, in an absence making the heart grow fonder kind of sense). You can tell children that if they work hard and they pass all their exams then they too will reap the rewards, based on merit, because that’s what happened to them.

Until, that is, you move away, and you become a creature of suspicion, even in teaching circles; the person with no connections, starting all over again, proving yourself, all over again, winding the web, all over again.

 

 

 

 

In Search of Perfection

It took me a while to get the hang of teaching, it has to be said. At twenty-two, I hadn’t really done anything work-wise, apart from the odd Saturday and summer job, selling ice-creams and working behind the bar. I wasn’t exactly ready for the demands of the workplace, no matter how intense the training course (I did a nine-month PGCE).

I’d gone from school to college to uni and back to school again, and through a stage of getting the sack (or at least, not being asked back to temporary office work or shop jobs – and the less said about my waitressing the better). Even getting my first permanent job as a teacher was a bit of a trial (if you live in a pleasant place where there is a teacher training college, there is LOTS of competition), after figuring out that a job with a bit of creativity and autonomy suited me better. It took me the whole of my PGCE to turn myself away from being a student, and I reckon another two years on top of that to get the hang of working as a teacher.

Apart from one horrible experience, it was OK, though. I may not have walked into a permanent position straight out of college, but along the way I had the opportunity to work alongside a series of older and more experienced teachers who took me under their wings. They supported me through my various Seemed Like Good Idea at the Times – and told me when I needed to go home and not come back in until I was feeling better too.

It helped (and kept me working, no doubt) to know that I was on an extraordinarily steep learning curve. I wasn’t supposed to be fantastic at all times. I’d never heard of Outstanding; instead, I used to wonder if I would ever turn into a Swan Teacher (probably not). I was allowed to be young and make mistakes. It was OK not to know it all (apart from at the Bad Experience School), to ask for help and advice. Seventeen years later, I still write to Rose at Christmas, my colleague who retired and then kept on teaching into her 70s, whose good ideas I used to steal shamelessly and whose brain I regularly picked.

Sometimes, when I read the discourse around new teachers (I like to call them baby teachers, especially as, at twenty-two, they could easily have been my baby), I feel sorry for them. Labelled on a scale of 1-4, graded from the moment they entered the school system as a child themselves, I am sad that there seems to be an element of resentment towards their educators; that they didn’t pop out the other end of the education system fully formed.

It seems to me to be one thing to ‘hit the ground running’, but altogether another to expect either yourself or someone else to be perfect. Maybe, if we stopped expecting new teachers, or even more experienced ones – or parents, come to that – to know it all at all times, that there should be more, somehow, than being on a journey to good enough, then those moments when we are forced to eat a slice of humble pie wouldn’t be so difficult.

I wrote a book about how to be a great, inclusive teacher, a part of which is learning from our mistakes – because we all make them.

You can buy it here: SEN Books   and here Amazon

 

 

She Stands at the Window and Weeps

The suds slide slowly,
Abandoning the porcelain
For the cooling, greased greyness
And a diminished, laboured repetition.

They echo, with their soft descent,
The trickled tracks
Of raindrops;
Crystalline sisters, wedded to glass.

Their tired decay
A contrasting parallel
To tears
As she stands at the window and weeps.

100% Literate

All children reading by age 6.

Apart from those who haven’t got the hang of speech sounds properly.

Oh, and those with a literacy difficulty (as yet, undiagnosed, because they are only 6).

And those with a diagnosed SEN.

And disabled children.*

Obviously, we don’t mean those children. THOSE children will never be literate.

Or will they?

 

Maybe we could stick with the 100% and look again at what we mean by literacy.

 

*children with Down’s syndrome were deemed ‘educable’ in 1971. It is only since 1981 that they have been able to attend mainstream schools.

Ofsted: Correction

I hate getting things wrong. Not backing up my claims with evidence and veering off into polemic was a regular criticism during my student days.

Yesterday, I veered off into such a polemic, and I would like to publicly state a couple of things I got wrong. I’d like to issue a public apology for the error.

• Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector did not make a speech. She wrote a commentary.  You can read it for yourself here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/hmcis-commentary-october-2017

If, like me, you are unsure what a commentary is, and its purpose, I looked it up and you can find the definition here: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/commentary

• There was a jot of admission of Ofsted’s responsibility for the narrowing of the school curriculum, with particular reference to ‘low attaining children’.

Here it is:

“Earlier this year, I commissioned a research programme to broaden our understanding of how curriculums are implemented in our schools, particularly the national curriculum as a key government policy. This was one of the main research priorities of my first year as Chief Inspector. One of the aims of this work was to challenge ourselves, as well as schools, about whether Ofsted has always recognised what is best in curriculum design, development and implementation. If we have not, I wanted to know whether inspection has played a role in bending the curriculum out of shape.”

I think 95 words out of 3,361 counts as a jot. (Definition here: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/jot )

Admitting when you get things wrong and making amends is important, I think.

You can find my original post here: https://notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com/2017/10/12/school-accountability-and-the-entitlement-to-a-broad-and-balanced-curriculum

It also appears in TES here: https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/ofsted-needs-take-responsibility-narrow-dry-curriculum-puts-our