A geography teacher warns Marcus Liddell that Ofsted and the education department are pointing in different directions.
“I teach geography to pupils aged 12-18 at an inner-city secondary school. It’s a diverse area, and most of the children are from ethnic minorities.
The job was my first in teaching and I do enjoy it. I enjoy being in front of the kids and the relationships with them, as well being able to teach the subject. Over the last couple of the years, though, I’ve become more cynical.
Every year since I started teaching there’s been changes; but since the coalition took power, their scale and pace have grown. One major one is the switch away from modular examination at GCSE: grades used to be based on exams held over an extended period, but now they’re decided in a single set of exams at the end of the two years. So we can no longer use the January GCSE exams as a measure of students’ progress; instead, we have to simulate them with mock exams. To get a reliable result we have to replicate the real exams, which is quite a strain on resources.
The new system is designed to make it tougher for the pupils, and represents a return to how things used to be done. But when we last used this system, pupils were equipped for it; I worry that the current crop really aren’t. I think the attention spans of the children I teach are noticeably shorter than when this system was last used; certainly, we’re expected to break tasks down for them now. It’s very hard to remember things you were taught 18 months or two years ago. But the pupils only get one shot now, and if they fail where does that leave them?
A further problem is that the exam system doesn’t fit with Ofsted’s demands. The Ofsted framework wants all lessons to have group work; it wants all pupils thinking independently – and we as teachers are expected to be doing all these wonderful activities. But to succeed in GCSEs, what do you need? You need to get the information down, you need to memorise it, and you need to regurgitate it in the exam – because that’s what gets you marks. Ofsted says it wants pupils to come out of school as creative, dynamic free-thinkers. However, the education system is moving in a different direction.
Ofsted is very powerful, though: there’s a general fear that an inspection can make or break your career. And we don’t know when their inspectors are going to come in: we might get half a day’s notice, and then it’s pot luck whether individual teachers are inspected.
Surrounding all this, there’s the issue of performance-related pay. At the moment, as part of what’s called performance management, you need 75 per cent of your examined classes to get their target grade. If they don’t over the course of years, then you might miss out on your six-year lump sum payment. Yet pupil performance isn’t just about teaching. It’s a question of how motivated the student is; whether the target grade is realistic; how hard they work at home; whether they have supportive parents. At the end of the day, we only teach them for an hour a week, and there’s only so much we can do in that time.
I’ve got a lot of bottom sets this year as well, and that brings particular problems. Many of my pupils will be doing foundation papers. They’re supposed to be easier than standard papers, and the highest grade that pupils can achieve is a C – but to get that C, they need a score of 80 per cent. Now, if you have a pupil who finds it difficult to study and you’re telling them they need to get 80 per cent, that creates a ‘mountain’ mentality. Some pupils just aren’t going to reach their target grades.
All that said, there are positive developments in education too. We’re quite well funded, and our school is well equipped. We have projectors in every room and interactive white boards, plus a new computer system – though in a perfect world I’d like to see money spent on more admin staff to help with things like photocopying, which takes up a huge part of my morning.
We also need a syllabus with which academically-gifted pupils can engage, but which also allows for students who learn in different ways. There is a move towards more vocational courses – pupils can study mechanics now through our school – but it would be good to offer more practical work in core subjects like geography.
Meanwhile, it’s important that there’s more cohesion between the exams system and Ofsted. And finally, I think teachers should be shown some appreciation. I don’t think any teacher does the job for the money. Most work incredibly hard, and they’re really dedicated to their profession. With so much changing in education, they just want to be listened to.”