Its the law - stupid
Category:
15 / 07 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
Its the Law – Stupid.
The party piece of all teachers who have been teaching for over twenty years is to hark back to a time when they could teach whatever they wanted to teach.
That isn’t strictly true. What they mean is that there wasn’t a national curriculum written down for all teachers to follow.
The jargon of the day referred to a national strategy, locally administered. Back then each Local Authority could advise schools about what they should be teaching. In truth they were doing just what many schools are being accused of doing today and that is that they were teaching to the tests. In their case the tests were the 11+ exam and GCE qualifications.
It must have seemed like a golden age. An Education Act in 1870 to set up 1200 School Boards throughout the land. Another Education Act in 1944 brought Faith Schools into the state system and set down the ground-rules for education. Then for almost four decades the state education system was deemed to be under control. The purpose and content of the curriculum was not in question.
In 1980 all that changed.
One Education Act per year has been the legacy. The reason being that there is now a need to codify all that was previously taken for granted and set it down in a legal framework.
The sad thing is that a lot of it is peripheral to the children.
The autonomy of schools to manage their own affairs has meant that schools now have employment responsibilities. There are set hours that a teacher should work. Part time techers have the same rights as full time workers, Invigilation is barred and soon covering for a colleague will become a rarity...and those are the obvious ones.
There are obligations about fire regulations throughout the school. All fire extinguishers need to be checked regularly, Fire drill has to be held each term. Checks need to be made on the chemicals used for cleaning the school. And risk assessments need to have been carried out on all equipment.
Legislation has spread from a set of guidelines which concentrated on discrimination, to a whole raft of do’s and don’ts about race, disability, gender, age, religion and sexual orientation. Harassment takes many forms and a school has to be on the lookout for it wherever it may occur.
Protecting children is also an area that the school governors have to be aware of. All employed staff need to have police clearance and absences of children have to be strictly monitored.
It seems that the behaviour of children and the way they learn has come to have a lowly place on the legal agenda of schooling but it is there none the less.
There is legislation on the power of a school to suspend pupils, to send them to special schools or most dramatically of all to expel them.
Schools have always had rules, but now all of those rules are enshrined in legislation, which is the real fear of most new teachers.
The sheer volume of requirements placed upon teachers nowadays leaves them feeling vulnerable. They feel that ignorance of these obligations can adversely affect their career. It need not necessarily be bad teaching in the first place but the fear of litigation can have a debilitating effect on the confidence of all young teachers, especially when some of the expectations are unrealistic.
Differentiation has been the buzz word for a year now. It means creating individual tasks for pupils whose needs are either ahead of or behind the rest of the class. It makes sense, but in a class in excess of thirty it cannot be done for all that many pupils. But the obligation is on the teacher to do it.
Similarly there is an expectation on a teacher to pick up symptoms of dyslexia, autism, colour blindness, hearing impairment and attention deficit.
Every teacher tries to do this. But to have a threat of negligence hanging over your head if you fail to detect these symptoms is a deterrent to teacher recruitment.
I for one think the all encompassing term ‘a duty of care’ puts too much of an onus on a teacher. Teachers teach because they want to do good work. What they don’t want is to be blamed for very possible underachievement of a pupil.
