I teach in a state school, my children attend state school. We do a great job - if it ain't broke....

Esther Fidler's picture
 3
Teachers are grafters. I regularly work until midnight to ensure my class have a great experience at school and they make outstanding (officially) progress. Government undermining of teachers, eroding of pension, cutting of funding and changing (again) a curriculum which works will lead to a lack of suitable motivated and qualified teachers in the future. I love my job, I really do, I can even see the point in a lot of the pen pushing I have to do, but the constant undermining has got to stop. We should value properly qualified people who run and work in schools, what do most parents know about the education of children? They may know what they want their child to do on a day to day basis but really, setting up their own school? Leave it to those who know what they're doing. I have an interest in gin, but I wouldn't know how to set up a distillery, how is this any different?
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Comments

Allan Beavis's picture
Fri, 22/07/2011 - 07:04

I totally agree.

In some countries - notably Finland - teachers are revered and they are not under constantly being undermined as they are in America, where increasingly their pay is performance related and linked to test results, with seemingly no other circumstances such as child poverty and deprivation being taken into consideration. In extreme cases, teachers have been unfairly fired, their defence having been eroded by the new regulations imposed by Charter Schools and politically motivated Education Chancellors.

In Asian countries, teachers enjoy an almost god-like status. In China, teachers are considered as having a major cultural, spiritual and inspirational influence on children and as adults the Chinese will still revere their teacher "masters".

Contrast this with Britain. It is disheartening to see that this present government does not listen to, or take teachers' views into consideration. Although Gove pays lip service to the skill and experience of teachers, his actions speak otherwise. Union leader after union leader has said that their meetings with Gove and the DfE on issues such as synthetic phonetics, Academies, the Curriculum, fall on deaf ears. Teachers stand dismayed to hear that Academies are encouraged by the government not to adopt the pay scale agreed with unions, to see that their profession downgraded when people with no formal teaching qualifications can teach in state subsidised Free Schools.

Gove has said over and over again that his model for school reform is the American one and teachers in the US are seeing their status eroded. Is this really what we want here? A system where schools pop out, created out of the vanity or selfishness of a group of parents or discredited teachers like Katharine Birbalsingh, whose every pronouncement is calculated to divide and frustrate, or packaged together as another product off the production line at one of the McEducation Chains factories? Where businesses run education, not educators?

You are right that the undermining of the teaching profession has got to stop. What parents have to seriously understand is that their natural allies are not government ministers or Free School proposers or Academy Chains but teachers themselves. We need to support teachers, stand up for the erosion of the rights because what education does not need now is demoralised teachers and the belief that teaching is not a profession worth training for.

Margaret Nelson's picture
Sat, 23/07/2011 - 12:06

Three cheers for both of you.


Rosemary Mann's picture
Thu, 22/12/2011 - 23:55

I totally agree too. To me its also so simple- that people who know how to run schools should run schools and those who think its a piece of cake need to wake up. As a governor, a parent and the partner of another hard working teacher, I also feel angry that such hard working people are undermined by government and by the constantly yapping ( yes yapping) hooray henrys who make up the free school lobby. I fought against a free school in my area by highlighting the fact that most of its support came from outside the area with a high proportion from New Zealand. The people involved were so arrogant that they couldnt see the irony in what they were doing.

As a newbie parent of a school age child I feel impassioned that this has to stop before the rot sets in and our childrens education is ruined for ever.

Good luck to you and people like you, you deserve a lot more than you are getting.

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