There is a low-level rumble of discontent in my school. It’s the sound of teachers’ concerns falling on deaf ears. Because our headteacher is listening to students, not us.
I believe in inclusion, but at my school this idea is taken to the extreme. My head takes on the most challenging students as a personal project, operates an open-door policy, and bends over backwards to keep them on the school roll.
These students seem to be given freedom to follow their own agenda in classrooms, and are encouraged to bypass their teachers and take any complaints straight to the head. Students feel heard, but teachers are shut out of the conversation. The result? Teachers’ authority is undermined and behaviour throughout the school is spiralling downwards.
Pupils excuse themselves from lessons, saying they have permission to see the head. Some are on first-name terms with our boss. To their less assertive mates these students are cult figures, whose behaviour can be copied. To the conscientious pupils whose lessons they’ve delayed with time-wasting debates, they are an irritant.
After such visits, staff are sometimes asked to explain a decision or incident raised by one of these pupils. One notoriously vexatious student complained about the way a teacher had organised their classroom because of where they were sat. The teacher was later questioned about it; it didn’t seem to have occurred to the head that they’d thought long and hard about the arrangement.
I would expect a head’s first response would be to defend the teacher and their reasoning – we all know what a Jenga game a seating plan can be: make one ill-thought out move and the whole edifice collapses.
Another teacher was offered the option of being part of a conflict resolution process after a disagreement with a student. But although the outside arbitrator came to hear the student’s side of the story, the teacher was never contacted. The teacher felt their side of their view hadn’t been given equal weight.
Then there was the colleague put on the spot when a student came into their classroom during a lesson to let the teacher know the head wanted to see them. This teacher was expected to hand their class over to the teaching assistant immediately, to visit the head’s office for a discussion about that student. It was the start of years of special treatment by the head of a child who danced late into lessons and conducted whispering campaigns against teachers.
It wasn’t until much later that this pupil was finally removed from the school. By then the teacher had left for a school where they felt supported. The student, for their part, had left behind hours of disrupted classes, uneasy teachers, and a chance of good GCSE grades.
All, and especially the most troubled, children should feel someone is on their side. But not if they are then pitted against those who are trying to help them. A leader who presents a united front with these kids makes the teacher feel they’re alone on the pitch in just their socks.
It’s a head’s job to lead – and, just as much, to listen. Perhaps more than in any other senior management role, there are two distinct groups of people to satisfy – children and the adults trying to corral them. As a member of one of those groups, I get that. But when one party can be made to feel vulnerable, the other more valued, has the head got the balance wrong?
If we didn’t believe in inclusion we wouldn’t do this job – everything should be done to keep children in school and learning; that’s what teachers are in it for. But it can be almost impossible to manage some children when they believe they have immunity.
We need to feel that all of us in the school have the same rights, that the head respects our professionalism and our concerns for the students in our classes, without being so easily persuaded by the version given by one young but seasoned manipulator of the system. We, the teachers, need to be listened to too.
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