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5 average rating | Chris Woodhead: “Teachers are no longer in a profession”
State school staff are expected to be puppets for ministers’ latest agendas - even if they are nonsense.
I don’t understand. Why has there not been widespread rebellion? Riots in teacher training institutions? Expressions of disgust in staffrooms?
Teaching is a profession. By definition, professionals determine their own beliefs and practice. They don’t twitch mindlessly as politicians pull the strings. But this is exactly what teachers in state schools are expected to do. How is it, I asked myself, as I wrote my new book, A Desolation of Learning, that we have surrendered so much professional independence so easily?
To become a teacher, you have to conform to the demands of the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), an organisation that now defines the standards to be achieved at various staging posts in a teacher’s career. So we have “core”, “post-threshold”, “advanced skills teacher” and “excellent teacher” standards, all spelt out with bureaucratic exactitude and all highly significant for any teacher who wants to progress in his or her career.
These standards, moreover, reflect the agency’s on-message priorities. This is an organisation that, to quote its corporate plan, has a “critical role in achieving the priorities of the Children’s Plan”, and that aims to “ensure that the key outcomes of the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda are embedded” in all its work. In other words, an organisation that exists to ensure nobody can become a teacher, or be promoted as a teacher, if they do not dance to the Government’s tune.
Then there is the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). This too is dedicated to promoting government policies. Its work, we are told, “will reflect the priorities of the Children’s Plan”. Why? New headteachers need to know what the Children’s Plan says, but the aim of the college should be to encourage a critical professional engagement with the plan’s priorities. This is not how Steve Mumby, the college’s chief executive, sees his responsibilities. “Understanding of the 14-19 reform agenda is embedded,” he writes, “in the NCSL core programme.”
Should government policy be taken as an unquestionable given? Am I alone in finding the statement that the college “will work with the TDA … to identify and support those leaders who have yet to engage in the ECM and extended schools agenda” rather sinister? You may not want the college’s support, but they know where you are - and you’re going to get it.
Most secondary heads belong to the government-funded Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). Every year it runs a major conference, which is now attended by some 1,500 heads. In 2008, the theme was Redesigning Schooling. Here are the titles of three of its sessions: ‘The Deeps in Action; The Co-construction Imperative; Improving Tomorrow’s Leaders’; ‘Student Voice as a Strategy for Transformation’; and ‘Pedagogies of Contingency and Transformation’.
If, reading the above, you feel a degree of mystification, don’t worry. I don’t have the slightest idea what they mean either. To check that senility had not set in, I phoned half a dozen heads I respect to ask what they thought. There was in each case a long silence. One said he felt queasy; another asked whether the conference had been sponsored by a millennial sect.
In crucial respects, the SSAT is a millennial sect. It clearly thinks it has access to divine education wisdom and it brooks no disagreement. Delegates (or should I say disciples?) were immersed from dawn to dusk in the “personalisation agenda”. Personally, I find this “agenda” deeply suspect. I know many other heads and teachers agree but, bombarded with propaganda and subjected to all sorts of pressures, they also know that to voice opposition is to threaten any chance of promotion.
Ofsted inspectors are, moreover, lurking about to check whether the curriculum has been “personalised”. Every inspection report I have read in recent years makes reference to “personalisation” and “active” learning. Woe betide the school that thinks the teacher’s job is to teach subject knowledge in a traditional way. As chief inspector, I fought hard to ensure inspection was an activity that held a mirror up to the school’s performance. I did not think inspectors should drag the Government’s beliefs into the classrooms they visited. When they do, inspection becomes an instrument of state control. That is what it is now.
So what of the new secondary curriculum and Sir Jim Rose’s primary curriculum proposals? Where do these developments leave teachers who believe that subjects matter? In the professional wilderness is the answer.
The official line is that nobody needs to know much about specific subject knowledge. The subject has become a vehicle for teaching cross-curricular “skills” and “dimensions” which, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority tells us, provide “important unifying areas of learning that help young people make sense of the world and give education relevance and authenticity. They reflect the major ideas and challenges that face individuals and society.” The alternative view is that it is subjects such as science, mathematics, history and literature that enable us to make sense of the world in which we live.
In my view, if relevance means that what is taught has to be immediately interesting to every child, then the only riposte is that education should not be relevant. Schools exist to teach knowledge that would not be encountered elsewhere, or, at best, encountered in a fragmented fashion. The more challenging and alien that knowledge, the more powerful the curriculum will be. Or, to put it a different way, the more immediate the “relevance”, the greater the danger of “inauthenticity”. An inauthentic curriculum is one that purports to achieve that which it cannot possibly deliver, which trades in meaningless feel-good phrases and exploits anxiety about the social concerns politicians have failed to resolve. This latest national curriculum is such a one.
You disagree? Fine, I am delighted. You are responding as a professional should. But where is the debate about these issues? We have all been programmed to believe the official line, or have learnt to keep quiet. Teaching is no longer a profession.
- ‘A Desolation of Learning’ is published next Friday by Pencil-Sharp Publishing.
Chris Woodhead, Chairman of private school company Cognita and former chief schools inspector.
Comment (12)
I have been wondering about some of these issues for a long time, and I feel that we are being bullied into submitting to the whims of the government. Having to change our lesson plans, strategies and objectives every time new "meaningless" directives are issued. I would like to know what actually happened to that grand idea "The National Curriculum", it has been eroded and watered down and the idea of a broad curriculum for all students no longer exists.
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18:06
15 May, 2009
Dafodilly
A key observation here is 'Where is the debate?' I have written articles with this theme at heart because my experience is a total lack of direct and responsive exchange between individuals, groups and between the 'people' and government.
Where we have the advent of the internet and where politicians and others could engage directly with we 'people' very readily, there is no such interaction.
The rhetoric that government, or others, are 'listening' or 'working with us' is nothing short of patronising and insulting to us all.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the early years birth to five domain right now where what is expected of practitioners according to government law and inspection and moderation is nothing short of ludicrous.
No-one in authority, however, will acknowledge this.
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned time management studies apart from anything else!
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18:58
15 May, 2009
debbiehep
My problem here is that, unless it's just a by-line error, this article is written by someone who was a prime mover in the creation of the agendas being attacked, who was part of setting up the mechanisms both formal and informal that allows this to happen.
Have I missed something here?
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10:26
16 May, 2009
Marshal Anderson
Marshal Anderson has hit the nail on the head, Mr Woodhead. You were a prime mover in silencing teachers and in creating state control of teaching and now you have the nerve to evince dismay. Ofsted inspectors, under your control, came into my school in 1995 and (among many other things) told our PE staff that the way they were teaching tennis was 'wrong'. YOUR inspectors, Mr Woodhead. It began with YOU.
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8:54
17 May, 2009
Middlemarch
Sorry, I'm giggling too much to respond sensibly.
Chris Woodhead wrote that article? Blimey, I hope he's avoiding the bolts of lightning god must be firing on his head for being so duplicitous!
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14:49
18 May, 2009
seren_dipity
I am not surprised that one of the Heads Woodhead phoned said he felt queasy! What a two-faced creepy git this man is. Good old Ted called him 'he of the ligneous noddle'.And he surely must be senile if he thinks we'll fall for all this $hite he's so pompously spouting. He started all this dictatorial rubbish. I wish he'd phone me and I'd have a right go at him.
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15:01
18 May, 2009
nutella
Presumably TES paid him for this article. So as long as it makes good copy he will write it. CW is the man I hold responsible for all that he is now complaining about. Hypocrisy at its worst in my opinion.
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16:31
18 May, 2009
blazer
I posted this on the opinion forum, but on the off-chance Mr Woodhead pops in to read his reviews:
I get the impression that Woodhead plays the tune that the audience pays to hear.
I wonder who he wants to buy his book....... um, that would be teachers, wouldn't it?
Previously who paid him to play? And whose tune did he play? It wasn't teachers' was it!
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17:03
18 May, 2009
seren_dipity
I have to agree with the other posters in that it was Mr Woodhead himself who was part of the problem he so roundly attacks. He built up the mechanisms and attitude that started it all off - teachers as incompetents etc. As was said of MPs recently, "He doesn't get it, does he?"
However, I do agree with the general thrust of the article ie. that some teachers are becoming increasingly dependent on government published teacher fodder such as the National Strategies and being churned out of teaching training with little ability futher than to be able to tick government checklists provided for them. It spills over into the fora on here too with "Can you send me a copy of your job application please?" requests. Still, I think this is a reflection of how our society has generally become a more infantalised one, rather than education uniquely and specifically.
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17:23
18 May, 2009
deleted303
You're right - however, we can find solace in the unquestionable truth that teachers are so terrible at providing training to other teachers that the possibility of transforming personalised and co-constructed contingencies into authentic pedagogies, or whatever, is rather limited.
And, the most active and critical priority that can be 'embedded' into the average teacher, trapped for three hours on a 'training day' in a chilly hall, undergoing any form of unifying indoctrination designed to encourage relevance, will be voiced as "Do you think they'll be any mini spring rolls on the buffet?"
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23:19
20 May, 2009
doddgirl
Yes, standing up against these changes results only in being 'silenced'. I have experienced this as a result of daring to suggest that ALL children should become numerate and literate by the end of KS2, not just the ones who have a chance of making Level 4.
However, on a broader level, I am surprised that people are shocked by this article or it's findings (regardless of the author's history). Surely it is clear that the state will decide upon what children learn. Schools were originally set up to teach children to be able to read - the Bible! With the goals of the world focused upon economics and "being able to compete in a global market", it is no wonder the corporations in which I used to work (and who are so closely linked to the dear government officials) are detailing the needs of the next generation in documentation we as teachers must then spew out.
I have no problem with the renewed curriculum as it's a mere re-branding of the old keeping us teachers too tired and busy to revolt. As for my civil rights being continuously depleted, I have a big problem - how on earth do I live my truth, retain my integrity AND keep a wage coming in whilst not harming those small folk I am blessed to teach?
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8:15
23 May, 2009
vchanin
i'm sick of the whole thing - why can't we just teach anymore for god's sake! I do feel very sorry for the children as they are such a constant experiment. Teaching used to be a brilliant job,but now i look around the school and everyong looks stressed, too tired to talk to each other anymore and that's why all these unnecessary changes come in. I do think it's true that if you voice any opposition, you lose your chance of any promotion
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Rating:
9:36
3 June, 2009
leerose