I read your editorial over my breakfast, looking forward to another “holiday” day as is the privilege of a full-time teacher (“It’s time for a positive narrative around teachers – and teaching”). However, as is so often the case, this day will be spent recuperating and marking. For so many teachers, like me, the minute you relax, ill health hits and 90% of your time off is spent trying to recover.
The results you quote from the NASUWT survey come as no surprise to me – I am living through them. I love my job, I’m good at it (“outstanding” according to our latest Ofsted visit) and, at 53 with 10 years’ teaching under my belt, I’m exhausted.
A constant stream of new government initiatives doesn’t help either, as we are constantly running to catch up with the latest curriculum change, and our head lives in terror of Ofsted – not because our school is no good, but because its rules keep changing too and being put into special measures can make a teacher’s life hell.
The Conservatives want to introduce a new initiative for secondary school teachers – a test in Year 7 for the pupils who didn’t succeed in primary school, adding to our responsibilities. Meanwhile, Labour propose greater recognition of the importance of our profession by ensuring all teachers are qualified.
That’s great – if only they could reduce our workload as well, because it’s all very well having a vocation, which I feel I do, but I would like a life as well.
Name and address supplied
Your leader will surely be welcomed by many people. However, to assert that “over the past few years the salaries of teaching staff have improved” should not go unchallenged. Along with other public sector workers, teachers in schools and colleges have had their salaries capped at 1% since 2012 and, according to an NASUWT survey in 2014, 51% of teachers had not even received that.
Coalition policies have led to the breaking up of national pay scales with incremental progression now at the discretion of headteachers. As you rightly point out, these policies have also led to a wider crisis of recruitment and retention to the profession and the pressure on teacher pay continues to be a key part of this.
Steve and Judy Harbourne
(Recently retired sixth-form teachers)
Winchester
Hants
Although they would deny it, in effect recent governments of left and right have treated teachers in state schools as knowledge-transmitting and skills-training technicians who need to be given a manual and rule book in order to operate in a pupil factory and who need rigorous inspection and regular pupil assessment in order to ensure that they are working at maximum efficiency and obeying the employer’s rules. This micro-management has done enormous harm. It is time that the instruments of government control – Ofsted, the detailed national curriculum, league tables, performance management, floor standards and early years testing – were swept away.
The next government should set up a national education council, composed of teachers, parents, business people, writers, artists and academics who can initiate the “positive narrative” about education that will enable teachers in state schools to teach collegially in accord with their training, experience and professional commitment.
Michael Bassey (emeritus professor)
Newark
Few captured the skills of a good teacher better than George Tomlinson, minister of education in the Attlee government: “What qualities go to make a school teacher? The wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the character of a saint, the knowledge of a doctor, a midwife and a sea-lawyer. These, combined with skill and determination and the hide of a newspaper reporter, add up to the most difficult and most rewarding profession.”
Professor Colin Richards
Spark Bridge
Cumbria
