Response to Question Time 14/06/2012

Watching Question Time on the I Player in one of my valuable free periods, it was interesting to hear Tim Farron, President of the Liberal Democrats, say “Allow teachers to get on with what they do best”. It was a phrase that is often bandied about but one that is largely ignored.

I became a teacher because I loved my subject areas and I wanted to pass on my enthusiasm and knowledge to others that share an interest. However, this is not what we have to completely contend with. We have to constantly update and comment on pupils withing our results. We have to constantly analyse results to show that we are doing our job properly. Currently I am having to waste time redoing perfectly good schemes of work because my place of employment wants a uniform model. This adds to my role as an exam marker as well as revision sessions, and extra things that I organise to try and raise awareness for my subject. Oh and in that I teach. It annoys me when people comment about how much holiday teachers get because most of us work hard during that time as well.

Governments say that the system doesn’t work and therefore needs changing. It might help if education was not constantly being changed and we could actually embed a system which we could work in. Constantly changing A-Levels/GCSEs helps nobody, because we have very little time to get used to system. Changing it piles more work on us, creating added stress and therefore a damaged work/life balance, which will impact upon our teaching.

It also kind of does not help having an idiot in charge of the education systems. Gove and Wilshaw are seemingly clueless on what makes our education system good and dump it on teachers. They want to take education systems and establishments back to what they had and i’m sorry but they need to get with the times. They also need to realise that not all kids are the same, have the same background and that schools are very different with different aims. It would help if Michael Gove visited a school north of Watford and stopped harping on about Free Schools and Academies when firstly it allows unqualified people to teach and secondly makes the education system too generic. Academies don’t help every school so stop rolling it out for every school.

Oh and the decision to remove EMA. I can see the effect on pupils and I can see why they questioned is. What people didn’t ask was the effect on schools. Well here’s the example. Nnumbers went down this year partly due to this. There have been huge cuts in funding and redundancies. More unemployed.

So Tim Farron. We would love to do what we do best. Having a chance to do it would be nice too.

*21/6 – Now Gove’s taking us back to O-Levels – Time Warp*