Don’t local authority education managers have enough on their plates without a crackdown on boring teachers? John Wrymouth investigates
January 2009
A teacher friend was more than usually exasperated when we chatted the other day. Actually she did all the talking. I just listened and nodded.
She was listing education issues that she thought worthy of public debate. There were plenty of them. Local authorities were having to create extra school places to cater for children whose parents could no longer afford to send them to private school, she pointed out. Demand for free school meals was also on the rise.
Then there was the shortage of headteachers, particularly in primary and faith schools. According to the annual survey by Education Data Services, one in three of England’s primary schools has had to re-advertise headteachers’ posts after failing to attract suitable candidates. The main reason is that deputy heads are reluctant to step up, feeling that the extra pressure and responsibility of headship is not reflected in the salary.
Another big issue bubbling away is how the government intends to replace the Key Stage 3 national tests, which it scrapped after the marking fiasco in the summer. She was absolutely confident that a new testing system would be put in its place and had no confidence whatsoever that it would be an improvement. ‘They’ll rush in with something that they haven’t thought through, and which will have all the same problems as Sats,’ she said wearily.
It’s fair to say she isn’t exactly the biggest fan of education secretary Ed Balls, but on this occasion it was Ofsted chief Christine Gilbert who raised the most anger. Gilbert knocked all these stories off the education pages in the newspapers when she called earlier this month for a crackdown on boring teachers, having noted a link between boredom and achievement. Or, as my friend put it: ‘Stating the bleedin’ obvious.’
Before you start cracking down on boring teachers (and it’s not clear exactly how that’s going to be achieved – would they have to pass some kind of charisma test?) wouldn’t it make more sense to strip out of the curriculum some of the stuff that makes it so boring? For both teachers and pupils. Like the seemingly endless test preparation, for example…