OFSTED... Grrrrrrr!

OFSTED.

That single word of doom. OFSTED.

It's not even a real word, it's an acronym, and yet it strikes fear into the very heart of every head teacher across the UK.  It doesn't scare me, it intrigues me.  I am a good teacher.  That's not me being big-headed, I am a good teacher.  I work my butt off every day in order to be a good teacher.  I know that the day I find teaching easy is the day I have to leave and do something else.  A good teacher is always trying and always failing, because we are, by definition, people who can always do better.  No two days are the same and no two children are the same, you are constantly improving, constantly making changes and constantly questioning why it was only good.  I want to be brilliant.  Every teacher does, but once we get there we also know there is nowhere else to go, so we keep trying to be brilliant and hopefully we'll get there by the time we retire.

I love my job.  For anyone who has read the backlog of blogs you'll know how much I love my job and I've never been scared of being inspected, but this new form of OFSTED is making me doubt my basic ability to teach.  The whole organisation was overturned in October last year and all new policies put in place, we were told more would be added in January and they were, but on top of that, the policies they had just put in place were changed. So, in short, we have had two major overhauls in four months.  This has sent senior management into meltdown.  We are trying to stay on top of it, but when the inspectors themselves don't know what they are doing, how on earth can we?

My policy has always been the same - the students come first.  Every student is individual, every student has their own target and their own strengths and weaknesses and it is my job to teach them how to deal with those difficulties and to teach them how to learn.  I also teach them how to be nice human beings!  I have been willing to stand up for my policy ever since I started teaching six years ago, and finally OFSTED have agreed the focus should be entirely on the students instead of the teacher putting on a show (under the last government, that's what we were expected to do).  They have a very simple policy:

Every student must make progress in every lesson and this progress must be clearly demonstrated throughout the lesson.

Ok, I can probably do that, although it usually takes longer than 50minutes for a student to understand the structure of a monologue and all it entails, but I'll give it a go.  Of course they forgot to mention the following points:

We will only observe you for 20minutes, we will fail you if we cannot speak to the students when we want, we will decide if the level of progress is acceptable or not and the clincher... if you question every student to make sure they have made progress, you are wasting valuable time that could be better spent teaching!

Are you kidding me??

I've never been scared or OFSTED and I'm still not. I'm hacked off and fed up.  Would it be too much to ask for the organisation to be teachers, ex-teachers, head teachers, consultants?  You know, people who are involved in education right now.  Is that too much to ask?  That the people who have the power to sack us or close us down for failure to provide a good education actually know what they are doing and actually know the situations we are faced with every day.  OFSTED should be a continual study of the school, the teachers and the students.  Anyone can fake it for two days (in fact some schools bring in advanced skills teachers to take the place of their 'less successful' teachers during an inspection), how about you subtly watch us for a term.  Watch us mess up, watch us battle with that student who just doesn't care, watch us succeed, watch us have a brilliant lesson that went completely off-plan, but where they learnt more than you could have planned, watch us laugh with the students who do care, watch us pick up the pieces of a broken family, watch us fail (yes, the horror, it sometimes goes wrong) and watch us try our damnedest to make up for it. Then judge us.  Judge us honestly and judge us fairly.  We're not superheroes and we cannot achieve the impossible, but by the end of the inspection you'll see we sure as hell try to!

You Can't Stop Someone Going Off the Rails...

I’m reading the last few pages of James Corden’s autobiography and I’m finding myself judging him as a brattish, selfish, ignorant idiot.  I love Gavin and Stacey and I generally like him as an actor whenever I see him on TV, but I’m shocked by how angry I am getting with him.  Throughout the book he has told me how wonderful his professional experiences have been, how genuinely fabulous the people he has met have been and how incredible the people he has worked with have been.  The over use of superlatives is driving me up the wall.  I get it, you’ve worked with Mike Leigh, Richard Griffiths and sat behind Piers Morgan before winning two BAFTA’s, you’ve had a glistening if not very short (so far) career.  He also apologises profusely for being an arse; for sleeping around with strangers, for not talking to his normal friends, for taking everything for granted, for keeping his neighbours up all night etc etc etc.  He spends pages describing how he lost himself and how he regrets his actions, but he was in a terrible place and couldn’t handle the success he was having.  Throughout this 336page book of self-realisation I have lost all sympathy for him and have judged him to be, as stated earlier, brattish, selfish and ignorant.

The question is, why?  I also read Michael J. Fox’s autobiography in which he describes the bubble he lived in throughout his life and the number of people he employed to polish the bubble so that his view was never obscured.  Maybe it was the brilliantly worded analogy that made me like him even more, maybe it was the brutal honesty he wrote with, or maybe it was the fact that he truly hit financial rock-bottom, I don’t know.  Both men shared a sudden and extreme success after trying for years.  Both men selfishly felt they deserved their success.  Both men lost the people they loved as a result of such selfishness.  So why do I feel such an annoyance towards one of them and complete admiration for the other?

The answer lies in me and in my judgment of these two people.  I strongly believe that you cannot stop somebody ‘going off the rails,’ you just make sure you do not abandon them when they do.  I teach several children who every day I desperately try to help, guide and, well, stop going off the rails.  The hardest thing I ever had to come to terms with was the theory of just not abandoning them.  I bang my head against a wall every time I hand out a detention for defiance, phone home to get the same voicemail (the one that NEVER calls you back), confiscate banned items, fill in report cards, but I do it because I want to.  The banging never stops; the day it does is the day I have to quit my job.  Here are two adult men who went off the rails for various reasons, I can understand the reasons why don’t I have the same sympathy for them; they are adults, they are victims of their own success and they have the maturity to realise their mistakes.  But why the difference between them?  The only reason I can think of is the time I read them.  I read Michael J. Fox’s autobiography when I was at university and desperately looking for inspiration from people who had also gone through difficult times.  Maybe I held him in some sort of figurehead, a person who acknowledges their downfalls and I saw him more as a romantic tragic hero.  Maybe I’m less tolerant now and so my view of James Corden is obscured; had I read them the other way around I might be more angry at the man who brought me the Flux Capacitor than I am at the one who brought me What’s Occurring?! 

This makes me wonder about the judgments I make every day, the people I meet and the influence my mood has on my relationships.  Spending a lot of time on my own a couple of years ago made me realise what makes me happy, what calms me down, what truly upsets me and how I can be alone without being lonely.  Now I need to realise when I’m feeling ‘hormonal’ or just having an ‘off day’ and remember not to make any major decisions on those days…  I have a strong feeling that it’s just not possible!  I guess that’s why I’m not Prime Minister; we’d declare nuclear war on the referee of the Six Nations just because he claimed a dangerous tackle against Youngs and I happened to be on my period at the time (ahhhh, Youngs). 

All I can do is remember I’m human, I’m not able to remain completely level-headed, logical and rational every day for the rest of my life.  I’m a working-progress, still learning, still f***ing up and still panicking when we run out of milk.  The most important thing is to, as Corden continually says, stay ‘grounded’ and the only way to do that is to surround yourself with people who like you, not your success, your money, your house, your ability to complete complicated maths, but the real you.  Something that Fox and Corden achieve at the end of their books is to understand the importance of family.  Trisha once said “addiction is signified by the impact it has on your relationships”.  It works in other ways too; if you’re not in contact with the people you love because you’re ashamed of something you’ve done or the person you are becoming, then you know you’re doing something wrong.  How quickly you face up to your mistakes is up to you.  I’d love to fast forward twenty years and talk to the kiddies I teach now, they’ll see I only want the best for them and I hope they understand why I spent hours on their backs.  I’d love to go back and talk to my old maths teacher; he was the only one who ever stood up for me (he hit his head so many times I gave him a permanent concussion), I’d thank him, I’d apologise and I’d tell him I understand why he spent hours on my back.

Thank you Mr Ellis!