Sport Specialsts
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26 / 08 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Specialist Schools – what are they.
The specialist schools programme was an initiative launched in 1993. By September 2006 over 80% of state secondary schools had become designated specialist schools.
The term can be confusing because the schools continue to provide a curriculum based on Maths, English and Science, but they believe that by emphasising a core subject they can improve standards throughout the whole school and make the curriculum more pupil orientated.
One of the most successful specialisms is sport.
The document called ‘raising your game – using the sport specialism to raise achievement in English, Mathematics and Science’ includes gushing quotations.
Kirkby Stephen Grammar School Sports College developed cross curricular work with Maths and Science around Cricket. Staff were impressed with the effect this had on the profile of cricket in the school and reported a significant decrease in minor disruptive incidents in Maths and Science lessons.
At Carisbrooke High School, GCSE borderline students who were likely to gain C or D grades were invited to take part in an activity week-end which would link maths and P.E. through various challenge based activities. 74% said the experience was likely to improve their performance in GCSE Maths.
Derby Moor Community Sports School used a sports themed film to produce some non fiction writing in preparation for Key Stage 3 examinations in English. The school reported a higher level of engagement and motivation in the students – particularly amongst the boys.
Such comments are likely to raise eye-brows. They create the impression that the scheme is a sop to motivate students who are not switched on by the orthodox lessons or traditional lessons, but there is a bit more to it than that.
Mount Bay School and Community Sports College developed a programme for targeting young people to improve their motor co-ordination skills in the belief that this would also benefit their overall achievement at school.
The areas where improvements occurred are revealing.
There was a 40% improvement in behaviour; a 56% improvement in organisation; a 65% improvement in concentration; a 60% improvement in handwriting and a 51% improvement in attainment.
What seems to be lurking in such conclusions is that there is a hidden curriculum where achievement is only part of the objective.
Increased cash allocation could be one issue. Low performing schools could be another. But it is worth looking at schools which have not considered changing to the status of a specialist school because some of them are voicing a desire to change.
Their target has been the tyranny of the national curriculum. The records of skill development are at odds with independent learning and creative learning. They too are looking at different options for change.
Change is, in fact, permissible within the Inspection Framework. Schools are expected to respond to local circumstances. Schools should contribute a pupils well being and development.
Some schools have embraced this to rewrite a curriculum.
St. John’s Comprehensive designed a series of 6 week modules. Classroom layout was altered; hour long lessons jettisoned and cross curriculum projects were introduced.
One example of this was a project on ‘the forest’. It incorporated visits; letter writing; doing safety assessments; carrying out health checks; writing tourist information leaflets in several languages; launching a cafe selling organic food; planning signs and of course keeping log books.
They didn’t have to rebrand the school. All they did was to start the initiative with the school under the auspices of the head teacher.
As with everything related to schools based education all that matters are results and inspection grades. This particular experiment yielded good and outstanding grades so there was obviously no need to pander to under achievers.
More significantly it marks the emergence of questions being asked after 10 years of the national curriculum. After years of managing with the present version, are we beginning to see the first shoots of a rebellion against its one size fits all philosophy?
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Standard Practice
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12 / 08 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Standard practice.
Ofsted stands for the ‘office for standards in education’. Their remit is to check the standards of education in all establishments where children are educated. This top to bottom approach is indeed wide ranging, because their brochure says that they look at establishments that cater for children from birth to seventeen. Now if that seems a bit of an exaggeration it has to be pointed out that they inspect the provision of all childcare as well as schools.
Pre school establishments like play groups do have to have an educational basis of some form albeit through the form of play, and they have been targeted as one of the key players who can affect the overall level of education in Britain. But such is the fear of things going wrong with the care of young children that they go to great lengths to make sure that everyone who wants to look after very young children is monitored, screened, regulated and inspected.
This operation starts with all childcare workers needing to be registered. That register is open to scrutiny on the ofsted website, and is also issued to the National Business Unit. This so called transparency allows anyone to see who is registered.
The information gathered by ofsted is sometimes in question and does need to be confirmed. Ofsted can and indeed does request to verify some of the information that it holds on its records. These include qualifications earned and references to where they were awarded.
Whilst the information gathered is not freely available to everyone, they do pass a lot of it on to Local Authorities as a statutory duty. They also pass on information to Children’s Services departments and even the Inland Revenue.
To compound all this ofsted carry out random inspections of all those who are on the childcare register and on the Early Years project register.
The inspections themselves are not linked to a traditional school inspection. Indeed they are carried out independently even when the facilities for child care are linked to a school or college. Such is the nature of them that there is little or no notice given that an inspection is to be carried out.
The most frequent means of inspection is by random selection, but a complaint about childcare provision will also trigger an instant visit.
At each inspection there is a routine procedure. The inspector will check on the premises themselves and then hold an in depth discussion with the registered person to check whether they are carrying out the correct policies. The physical presence of an inspector allows them to go through the registration details and to check that there is complete understanding about the conditions of registration. It all sounds very authoritarian but it does at least allow for a third party to assess the safety of the premises, and to look through the risk assessment forms. It allows an independent person to scrutinise the recruitment policy and the way that places make sure that un-vetted people do not have unsupervised access to children. Perhaps the most helpful outcome of all inspections is that it ensures that all staff end-up being aware of all the policies and procedures that they are expected to follow.
It is standard practice for the results of all inspections to be written up and posted on the ofsted website for all to see. It represents a response to past scares about the care and responsibility for children and so far it has had an effect. There has been an improvement in the standards of preliminary education and socialisation skills that very young children need if they are to succeed at school, but the whole process is not foolproof. Some qualified staff who recently retired have been told that they can expect a visit from an inspector shortly.......but then that’s bureaucracy for you.
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Watch out for academies
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22 / 07 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Watch out for academies.
Watch out for posts advertised in the newly created city academies next time you skim through the situations vacant columns of the educational press.
City academies have been introduces to combat failing schools and have been built mainly in inner cities. But here is the rub. They have been hived off to independent financiers who can then create their own semi independent schools.
Two million pounds contributed from donors and up to twenty three million from the state purse has meant that some very modern and well resourced schools are now recruiting staff.
To teachers looking for a new post this represents a very interesting trade off. The location might not be great. The intake of pupils could well be what is usually called challenging but on the plus side the facilities will be up to date and what’s more greater flexibility is allowed with the curriculum. It will still be made up predominantly along the lines of the national curriculum but there will be more scope for flexibility than in state schools.
City academies are a government initiative. The target is to create 200 such schools and the budget allocation is in the region of £5 billion of state funding. Alongside this private backers are expected to contribute £2 million to each school.
There is no doubt that having the likes of Norman Foster to design your school adds kudos to the building, and having a football club owner like John Medejski adds status to the scholars, but I for one can not help wondering just what these people have to do with education.
Stockbrokers, hedge fund managers and property developers thrive in the financial sector, but that does not mean that their skills automatically transfer to the academic field.
The colleges in Oxford and Cambridge had a similar beginning because they too were set up using private bequests so perhaps it is not appropriate to get too high-minded about where the money originated. But what does have to be considered is how much the policy affects the state sector. The initiative is in direct competition with the state sector which is asking for money from the same pot.
It all adds up to an odd hybrid that is difficult to quantify.
You can’t help wondering why the educational penny has not dropped. Good teachers make good schools. Good teachers and a good head teacher make a great school. Why then are city academies being flaunted.
The feeling is that it is a cute way to get some outside money into a school building fund. However the grand sum is not much in comparison to the overall budget.
From a teachers point of view it spells out two things. The location may not be good but the facilities will be. If that is your bag then keep an eye open for vacancies. However there is a word of warning. City academies do not need to take teachers who are registered with the General Teachers Union. In other words, you need to check the conditions of service quite carefully. There have been allegations that these schools expect their teachers to work longer hours than their state sector counterparts.
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Its the law - stupid
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15 / 07 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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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.
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How long is a delay?
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08 / 07 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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How long is a delay?
On Feb. 23rd 1991 The Times of Zambia reported that there had been a marking fiasco relating to the grade 7 exams.
Grade 7 exams were taken at the end of a primary school education and were used to determine who went on to secondary school. Not all children did so of course, so the exam results had a bearing on the future of many of the poorer Zambian children.
As a teacher at a private school in the north of the country I watched with bemused interest as the tale unfolded, because the newspaper report pointed out that the results would be delayed by a term.
I thought back to this event recently, when the company called ECS Europe, which won the contract from the National Assessment Agency also announced that the results would be delayed, but in this case they would be just one week late....or so they promised.
The trouble in Zambia started when the Ministry of Finance decided to buy a new optical scanner to replace the old IBM model that had been used to read and mark the old grade 7 papers.
They duly bought one, but because they had a large stockpile of IBM paper, they asked to have their machine modified.
The new Opscan 21 model 75 bespoke version broke down. That was when it was discovered that, as a savings exercise, the Ministry had failed to take out a maintenance agreement.
To make matters worse, the franchise holders ‘RDS Computer Systems’ who were supplying the repair kit wanted their fee in US dollars. Unfortunately, neither the Zambian Government nor the Ministry of Finance had very much foreign exchange of any sort, least of all some spare dollars.
The beleaguered Ministry promised that the exam results would be out before the end of April. Few set their hopes very high. Most expected that they would lose a whole term of schooling.
Fast forward to May 26th 1991. The Times of Zambia reporter Terence Musuku wrote a piece explaining that the grade 7 results had in fact been delayed for 2 whole terms. This was factually true, and yet the Ministry of Finance had kept a strong silence when it came to offering any kind of explanation.
The upshot was that when the pupils did reach their new schools, they had just 63 days in which to do a whole years work. It was a logistical nightmare and only after 4 years were the true ramifications felt, when those reaching the end of their secondary education found out whether they had caught up or not.
The attitude of the Ministry of Finance towards the pupils was indeed callous.
The worst that can be said of the ETS marking agency is that its whole operation has been a shambles. There is nothing new in this.
All parents have to be notified before the end of term. They probably will be, but it will be interesting to see how this unusual outcome is interpreted. There could be a lot of huffing and puffing, but the African attitude could prevail. Missing a deadline could be seen to be no big deal.
Now that would be an interesting outcome in the climate of never ending targets.
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A cricketing comeback
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30 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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A cricketing come back.
Cricket is played on open spaces. But open spaces of land are something that many schools in England simply do not have.
In the race to make schools adhere to commercial values in the Thatcher Era, school governors’ were given greater power to run schools. Performance League tables were introduced. They disclosed the examination results of each school. Achievement, which in reality meant academic achievement, was everything. A hard nosed business attitude was imposed on the running of a school.
A less conspicuous casualty was the land used for playing sport. These were seen as being of only marginal significance. The school curriculum expanded in Maths, English and Science. Sport lost out and many playing fields were sold off in order to re-equip schools with such items as I.T. suites.
Now the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way, but of course it is not possible to buy back the land which has been built on.
Cricket, in the guise of a campaign called ‘a chance to shine’ is seen as a team sport like no other. It is the ultimate team game because it demands both individual and collective responsibility.
Cricket insists upon high standards of conduct and provides good role models.
In the course of ten years the campaign aims to reach a third of the schools in England and Wales. It also aims to engage with 2 million young people.
So how can it possibly do that when schools don’t have much more than a tiny playground?
The ‘chance to shine’ campaign is broken down into individual projects which revolve around the activities of one cricket club and a cluster of 6 schools located in the vicinity of that cricket club.
It is an imaginative plan.
Coaches are assigned to provide 300 hours of their time to the 6 designated schools in the summer term. Schools have to sign up to a 5 match season. Clubs open up their own grounds and practice areas and in turn schools get non turf pitches and playground markings.
In 2006 400 coaches delivered over 20,000 coaching hours. There were over 5000 inter school matches and the vast majority of schools taking part had ceased to offer cricket on the curriculum.
The graph of improvement continued throughout 2007.The number of children taking part jumped to 99,000 children. The number of coaching hours clocked up rose to 44,000 and as a result nearly 10,000 matches were played.
The highlight for many children is the summer camp. There is no shortage of big names involved in these. Ashley Giles and Gladstone Small ran the Birmingham Camp. Michael Vaughan gives talks on playing in Test Matches. Wasim Khan acts as operations director for the whole ‘chance to shine’ programme.
In educational terms they all see cricket as a sport that builds the foundations of strategic thinking.
It also nurtures qualities of leadership. Finally it has the unique quality of being a game for the individual intertwined with the need to be a member of a team, which in this case comprises of young people.
It is all very commendable. The sad thing is that nobody said all of these things when the sports fields were being sold off in the first place.
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Colourful teaching
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24 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Colourful Teaching
Who would have thought that the classroom colour-scheme would affect learning but it does. What’s more it needs to, because 1 in 10 children in the U.K have a mental health disorder.
British young people are involved in more violence, drug taking and binge drinking than any other European teenagers. G.P’s prescribe anti-depressants to 40,000 children in the U.K. and Britain, despite its affluence paradoxically comes out bottom of the world happiness league.
There have been many explanations for this and most centre around insecurity, lack of status, lack of achievement and lack of any autonomy in what is happening to them.
The buzz word in terms of a solution is good self esteem, because from that springs appropriate behaviour, more self confidence, greater motivation, and subsequently faster learning.
So where does the colour of the wallpaper come into this.
Kaleidoscope Colour Therapists are beginning to link colour association to patterns of learning. They believe that by visualising a colour the brain will quickly trigger the response the child associates with that colour, and that will provide a vehicle for expression where words can be too tangled up in emotions.
Some colours make you feel safe, calm and relaxed. Turquoise is a relaxing colour; orange is a happy colour, red a fun colour and blue breeds confidence. Some colours put you in the right frame of mind to build consistent ground rules that are shared by all, others take away the fear of failure.
The most quoted example is that of pale blue which is said to have a calming influence in a hyper charged pupil.
Other tools in the armoury of creating a positive learning atmosphere where negativity predominates is to introduce mirrors to enhance the light and music to alter the mood. These along with the feelings of well being help to release opioids and dopamine in the brain. These are so called feel good chemicals.
All of the emphasis on self esteem may not appeal to traditional teachers but the responses from teachers who have absorbed the philosophy into their teaching have reported a good response.
39% of pupils were calmer, more enthusiastic and willing to attempt work in the classroom; 44% showed an improved willingness to work and co-operate with other children; 56% were able to do group work and contribute in a positive way; 61% were able to ask for help rather than sit on the back row employing avoidance strategies and 67% improved in their relationships with fellow pupils at school.
Children explained it more simply. One said that working with colours helped him because he didn’t hit people when they annoyed him.
Parents also noticed the difference. One thought that the colour integrated teaching scheme was the main reason for her daughter wanting to come to school again.
The scheme often includes just one room in a school and one designated teacher to teach children with a mental health disorder.
It is an interesting development in a system that relies less and less on placing children with mental health issues in separate schools and although in its early stages of development it really is worth heeding the old words of wisdom ...watch this space.
http://www.kaleidoscopetherapy.com
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Hey ho, its exam time again.
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19 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Exam Time.
Hey ho it’s that time of the year: - exams time.
It’s the time of the year when the hall gets transformed into a surreal furniture shop filled with rows and rows of desks. It’s the time when you aren’t allowed to turn round and speak to the person you have been friends with all year. It’s the time when you are asked to fill 15 blank sheets of paper full of concise information when in fact it’s your mind that is blank. Most remarkably it’s the time when you are asked to write in longhand for the first time for months a on the pretext that if it’s legible and grammatically correct you could earn an extra 4 marks.
Exams occupy a very strange place in the psyche of the British academic mind. They are deemed the only factors for measuring the educated person.
The latest benchmark sets all schools the objective of 30% of pupils achieving five grade A* to C GCSE’s. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Indeed many would deem it the very minimum that all parents would expect but the strange factor is that nothing else is expected. There is no mention of learning how to cope with the vagaries of real life. No need to develop a personality. No need to be able to cope with adversity or family difficulties. No need to be able to relate to other people, no attempt to communicate with people from other lands, manage money, play a musical instrument or learn to dance.
Thankfully all schools do do this. We may cringe at the titles such as PSHE and Civic Training and positively scream when mention is made of the hidden curriculum but deep down we realise that this is still the fundamental socialising role of a school.
The run up to pupils taking GCSE exams is usually three years. Years 9, 10 and 11 are the years when subjects have been chosen and others dropped.
If you study the small print on a GCSE syllabus (especially those distributed to external candidates who are studying evening classes or at home) you will notice that they recommend approximately 75 hours of study. There will be some coursework questions to submit and perhaps an assignment but these are a kind of homework and in truth not compulsory.
If you stand at the school gates of any school you will soon realise that schools no longer all finish at 4 0’clock. Some finish as early as 2.30, others at 3.00 or 3.30. The explanation is that they all vary the length of the lunch breaks and playtime and some work straight through. But underlying all the variations is the inviolate rule that there needs to be 5 hours of class contact or teaching in every day or put another way 25 hours per week.
The bizarre connection between these two statements is that each GCSE subject is equivalent to just three week’s school teaching. For five subjects that represents 15 weeks and yet the school year extends over 38 weeks. Over three years it exceeds 100 weeks.
I for one welcome that. No matter how many subjects are studied, be it five or ten, there still needs to be recognition that the school is more than a factory for qualifications. The school play, the swimming gala, the sports day, the assembly, the choir festival, the school trip, the inter school cross country competition, the house points competition, the school band, the after school chess club, basketball club, craft club and even the fund raising committee all play a role in shaping a pupil.
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Sure is a sure start
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10 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Sure is a Sure Start
Robert Nyrere famously stated the obvious when he spoke about the educational provision in Tanzania.
He pointed out that Tanzania was a poor country and therefore could not afford to educate the very young.
“We expect parents to teach social and family skills to their children up to the age of 8. We will then offer an education to everyone up to the age of 12. After that only the most gifted will be educated at secondary schools.”
This contrasts starkly with the provision in England. The Government is intent on cutting what it calls child poverty, mainly because the link between poverty and poor educational achievement is so well documented. They have introduced an ambitious scheme called Sure Start and it is affecting all aspects of a child’s education from 0 – 14 and even higher for disabled children.
Children’s Centres have been set up in what are deemed to be deprived neighbourhoods to offer child and family health services such as health screening and health visitor services. There is advice on parenting, and local childcare provision. All offer some form of early year’s educational provision with a qualified nursery nurse teacher on hand. There is even help to get parents into work.
Is it working?
The answer seems to be yes. A recent survey of 9,000 families showed that children who had been through the Sure Start Children’s Centre programme were more likely to be helpful, much more independent, generally more obedient and certainly kinder to each other. There was also a significant improvement in parenting. As a result the children were more likely to have started to read, know some songs and to have tried their hand at painting.
All of this has a knock on effect when they start nursery school and head teachers have gone on record to point out that they can now spot the children who are Sure Start children. They are more independent, their language skills are more developed and one teacher even pointed out that they know that they ought to put an apron on before they start using water.
Given that the first such centres opened in 2003 then these findings are based upon a growing set of observations. The aim is to have 3,500 such centres up and running by the year 2010.
It may be irksome to have so many so called strategies and frameworks floating around in the information packs but there is a recognisable pattern. The slogans about joined up thinking are beginning to take shape.
‘Every Child Matters’ is an extension of the integrated approach to education, health care and public service provision. ‘Excellence and enjoyment’ is an attempt to head off alienation and drop out in schools that do not have a high level of children going on to higher education.
The most recent is The Rose Report. This is an independent review carried out to analyse best practice in the teaching of reading. It has been compiled by Jim Rose a former Deputy Chief Inspector of schools. It aims to promote a greater literacy level across the whole population including adult education.
As such the education world is awash with pending reform....much as it has been for the last forty years.
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We tell them what we think of teachers
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03 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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We tell them what we think of the teachers.
School inspections in the U.K have been criticised by the Organisation for Economic Development because they create considerable strain and additional work.
Inspections have been a high profile fact of life since 1988 when educational reforms gave greater powers to school governors and league tables of exam results were published.
School inspections can last from between 2 days to a week and all inspections end with the school being given a grade. The four grades of outstanding, good, satisfactory or unsatisfactory carry as much of a stigma for a school as passing the 11+ once carried for a young pupil.
Ask any teacher who has undergone a successful inspection and they will tell you that the elation is unforgettable. That’s the time when they feel that all their dedication and hard work has been justified. Quite simply it boils down to a healthy dose of recognition.
There have been many instances of schools being recognised for the good work that they do. Nevertheless the age of inspections has brought in its wake a regime of negative criticism. Fear seems to have cast a shadow right through the education system to the extent that there is a shortage of candidates prepared to apply for the post of head teacher. That is a mark of how deep it has gone.
The pupils’ perspective on inspections is interesting.
“The best thing is that the inspectors ask us what we think of the teachers.”
But they are not fooled. They too can see that the exercise is a charade.
“When they came we had to change the time of our break so that they didn’t see us going mad in the corridors. We all had wear black shoes and black ties and tuck our shirts in. The teachers told us not to ask questions in case we asked the wrong ones and we were told to smile all the time.”
Ted Wragg famously told schools to aim low when the first league tables were set up.
“That way you can keep on improving!”
He realised that there would be setbacks. He had had experience of a cohort moving up through a school that could seriously damage one year’s performances. He realised that it was a fact of life in teaching – not an issue to highlight the fact that a school was failing.
Teachers were also astute enough to notice that exams were being simplified so as to make it appear that results were improving year on year.
Now twenty years on the whole reputation of the education sector is in disrepute. The claims and counterclaims are seen to be meaningless. The sheer number of government initiatives has overwhelmed many schools. The speed with which they have been asked to implement them has been seen as a distraction rather than a benefit.
Schools in favourable locations have traditionally outstripped others in poorer districts in the league tables. This is no surprise to teachers and overlooks the fact that many schools are performing well given their overall circumstances and resources.
School governors of a high calibre do not grow on trees. It was always an unrealistic goal to get an even spread of highly competent governors for every school to make sure that they improved.
One of the earliest instruments of a school inspection was the introduction of a document called the self assessment report. Like an annual report at a board meeting it made a good tool for analysing how a school was doing and just like any company manager, armed with such a report any head can see how the school is performing. A public naming and shaming process is not absolutely necessary.
The golden age of school inspectors painted them as benign old birds that descended on a school to quietly spread their wise words in a friendly but constructive way. Everyone knew that they were wily. Everyone knew that they never missed anything and yet they did not spend their time rubbishing the hard work and dedication of a whole profession.
Today’s pendulum has swung too far. Yes there was a need for a National Curriculum. Yes there were some sub standard teachers. But education is a fully interlocking jig-saw puzzle that involves resources, staff and buildings and these only function well when there is an agreed pact between teachers, pupils and parents. Getting to that point isn’t easy and you do not do it by force. Neither do you do it by throwing money at it. You do it by setting a climate of aspiration.
Let’s hope the times are beginning to change and that the OECD rebuke marks the beginning of that change.
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Leading the blind
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27 / 05 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Deaf Children
The Maths lessons at Bolton Street School in Kirklees had to be exciting. The same was true of the English lessons. Indeed it was true of all lessons because all the children attending that school had a lot of power at their fingertips.
That school was the one which catered for all the children in the borough who had hearing difficulties. Some were only slightly deaf. Others were profoundly deaf.
They all wore earplugs and had lanyards around their necks. Attached to these were little boxes that controlled the volume. Should you happen to deliver a poor lesson, then the judgement was given in an unusual way. It wasn’t always easy to spot the serupticious movement, but the outcome was the same. The children switched off ...literally.
You knew it. They certainly knew it and it created a very strange balance of power between pupil and teacher.
That’s why when those teachers’ said that their job was rewarding, it meant something different.
When they said it was satisfying, that too meant that they could instantly measure the progress that was being made.
Above all it was challenging. Being deaf means that children are able to speak but if they have been deaf since before they learned to speak they have no means of gauging how words sound. This is where the true meaning of the word support comes in.
People who are born slightly deaf or severely deaf need help, support and guidance in order to develop their language and communication skills. It is part of a compulsory, life time skill which they need to learn in order to live a life as close as possible to what is considered normal. This help is provided by ‘Teachers of the deaf’.
‘Teachers of the deaf’ support individual students, who attend mainstream schools or special schools. One important part of their role is to collaborate with class room assistants who are presence in all lessons. The teachers then go on to manage the support.
As well as working with the pupils, ‘teachers of the deaf’ also work very closely with their family. They provide advice on the child’s development and up to date information about their progress.
Teachers of the deaf could also find themselves working in hospitals or other health care settings as part of a team of professionals, mainly working on audio logical and advisory services. In some cases teachers may work in higher or further education.
The progress that has been made with hearing aids and appliances has been huge. However, it is important to remember that technology is not the only tool of the deaf. Anyone working with older learners will be reminded of the fact that some people have grown up using sign language, observation and strategies. In other words they have coped without technology.
If you’re interested in this type of teaching then the first qualifying point is to have qualified teacher status, along with mainstream classroom experience.
If you are a undergraduate and therefore do not have a teacher status, then you will need a BEd degree. This combines subject and professional studies with teacher training and leads to a Qualified Teacher Status. Such a course normally takes 3-4 years.
If this option does not apply to you then a alternative could be to study for a degree with QTS, this combined degree includes subject studies with teacher training.
If you already have teacher training status then the next step is to contact a Local Authority, ‘heads of service for the deaf’. They will be able to provide you with information on qualifying for ‘teaching the deaf’ within their area. It is also very useful to have had some experience either in a special needs school or in a mainstream school where deaf children may attend.
Some post graduate degrees in Education combine professional studies with practical teaching experience.
The Graduate Teacher Programme is appropriate if you have a degree; you’re over 24 and have some teaching or classroom experience. This programme lasts approximately for one year. You will generally work in school and train at the same time.
The Registered Teacher Programme is for you if you have no degree but have completed at least 2 years of higher education. You must be over the age of 24 and have some classroom experience. The programme normally lasts 2 years along with you working in school while training and taking further studies.
Teaching the deaf is a very rewarding niche form of teaching. If you live in Scotland then teachers of the Deaf should contact: 01314768212 otherwise try http://www.tda.gov.uk
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Every Child Matters.
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20 / 05 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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EVERY CHILD MATTERS
The five why’s still solve a lot of problems for teachers.
Johnny why are you late?
I slept in
Johnny, why did you sleep in?
Mum didn’t wake me up?
Johnny, why didn’t she wake you up?
Because she was out late last night
Johnny why was she out last night?
Because she has got a new boyfriend.
Johnny why has she got a new boyfriend?
Because my dad has left home.
Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but many a teaching problem is related to things that have very little to do with lessons. Today any teacher in that position would hear the words ‘Every Child Matters’ ringing in their ears.
It is a new strategy, meant to link a number of agencies which get sucked into dealing with complicated home and school and social issues. In the past they have not been co-ordinated.
Peter was from a lone parent family. He had a 13 year old sister and a 2 year old brother. His attendance at school was poor. He only attended 60% of the time and on the days that he did go he was late. He always appeared tired and suffered from coughs and impetigo. At home he was problematic. He wouldn’t behave or go to bed on time. On top of that Peter’s mother was new to the area and didn’t know where to go to get any help.
In this particular case, the mother attended a mother and toddler group to improve her parenting skills. She secured one to one tuition for Peter. The school attendance service sends someone round twice a week and the school nurse checks Peter’s health regularly.
In another case three children aged 10, 14 and 15 all from the same family were involved in disputes and anti social behaviour. The problems evolved around truanting, theft, vandalism, starting fires and an involvement with drugs. The offences occurred at school and on their estate.
Once again there were a number of agencies involved. There were the police, the school, youth offending officers and the fire service as well as the whole family themselves.
The idea of co-ordinating all of these people is not new but in the past it has been down to the experience of individuals and their knowledge of how a local community operated.
Now there is a common process which enables practitioners to make an assessment. It involves filling in a standard form to record the assessment. There is a cross checking process involving health services, education, social development, housing and family services.
It all comes under the title of the Common Assessment Framework. What’s more it is beginning to show results, but it deals with problems that occur most often in deprived areas and with families that have most difficulty in ensuring that children do well at school. What is needed is for teachers to be able to understand how different agencies inter relate with children.
At the moment this is not happening and most worrying of all is the fact that it does not translate well into school lessons.
Lessons which relate to social services get lumped together with topics on personal safety, how to open a bank account, healthy eating, understanding different cultures and the environment. Many pupils find the Pastoral lessons themselves boring. They would skip lessons if they could and don’t find them very relevant.
This may be because in some developed countries the whole process of relating to a community has become too fragmented and complex. In such circumstances developing countries have a lot to teach those societies they are supposed to be trying to emulate.
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Recruitment Time
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13 / 05 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Recruitment Time.
In the three weeks leading up to the middle of May, The Times Educational Supplement had 4 added sections all devoted exclusively to advertising teaching posts.
They contained over 400 pages each week. This is a staggering volume.
There were jobs in Nursery schools, Primary Schools, Middle Schools, Specialist Education, Independent Prep schools, Secondary Schools, Independent Senior Schools, Multicultural Schools, Colleges of F.E. and Senior Appointments for Local Education Authorities.
For good measure there were 30 pages each week on jobs in Universities, Adult Education, Outdoor Education, Summer Schools, Examiners and Children’s Services.
Whatever your specialism, there were plenty of vacancies.
In the Mid May edition there were 29 pages of vacancies for Maths teachers, 28 pages for Science teachers, 26 pages for English teachers, 14 pages for teachers of Modern Languages, 13 for P.E. teachers, 10 for teachers of Religion, 8 for Music teachers and 6 for Drama teachers. It seemed that no specialism was left out, and although most of these were in the state sector some were also in the independent sector.
These vacancies show that there is a teacher shortage emerging in the U.K.
As you trawled through the box adverts, the incentives jumped out at you. Alongside the familiar Inner London Allowances and the Outer London Allowances there were a lot of references to TLR’s.
TLR stands for Teaching and Learning Responsibility. These replaced management allowances in 2006 and are paid to classroom teachers who are prepared to take on additional responsibilities. Increasingly these involve leading on staff development and line management. Interestingly the rates have been growing. Now they carry a bonus of between £6,500 and £11,000. Some schools offer a second appointment. This is called a TLR2 and carries a fee of between £2250 and £5,500.
All of the adverts represent an increase of 23% over the past year which again suggests that some kind of teacher shortage is developing, but the glut in advertising has to be taken in context.
If you want a new job in teaching then May is a critical month. Most teachers like to start at a new school at the beginning of the academic year. That means starting in September. However, if you are to give the statutory 2 months notice AND include the fact that schools do not open in August then you have to have made a move before the end of May. All of this means that job application forms set a final date for applications around the middle of May because they anticipate all the administration that is involved with a new appointment.
Such a time-table contrasts strongly with overseas posts.
They peak in mid July and August. That is when many overseas teachers return to the U.K. and are available for quick interviews at clearing house conferences in London.
But if all of this implies that there is a right time to apply for jobs, just remember that it is the quirky advert that often offers the greatest reward. A small single teacher school in Kenya placed a tiny advert in December. They hadn’t had a reply to one in May and another in August. They were desperate because the incumbent teacher had reached the end of their contract and had reluctantly agreed to do only one more term. The school had just 10 pupils and they got just one reply. But the teacher who did reply hasn’t stopped raving about it since he got back over a year ago.
It all goes to show that you can apply at unusual times.
If you have applied for a post in unexpected circumstances we would love to hear about it.
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Qualified to teach
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29 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Qualified to teach.
A teaching qualification is a teaching qualification is a teaching qualification.
Well you would think so and to an extent it always has been so, but now that Qualified Teacher Status is not quite the end of the road some of the anomalies that it has thrown up are beginning to be addressed.
Resolving some of the differences between various forms of teaching have always been a bit confusing, so predictably sorting out the new status is proving to be just another muddle.
Consider the simple process of training to be a class teacher.
Training involves a certain amount of specialism. Trainees opt to follow a course leading to teaching either primary, juniors or secondary children. However Qualified Teacher Status does not disqualify a secondary school teacher from teaching in a junior school or a junior teacher teaching in a secondary school. Many teachers swap. They realise that their aptitude lies in one or the other and they simply apply to teach in a different school. Many teachers have also opted to take on extra work in the evenings at adult education institutes.
Invariably such work involves subjects taught in schools such as Maths, English, French, IT, or perhaps Book-keeping, but this is not always the case. Teachers who had a special aptitude can use their teaching qualification as a passport to teaching other subjects. I have known a teacher who was also a regional badminton champion. He ran coaching courses. Another teacher runs courses in bird watching and a third one teaches the guitar. Their teaching qualification was recognised in what is called the Further Education Sector, i.e. teaching pupils aged 16 and above.
That state of affairs still applies, but lecturers in Further Education Colleges can come into teaching by yet another route. They may be chefs, hairdressers, motor mechanics or physiotherapists. More often than not such tutors will have taken a Further Education Teaching Certificate over a one year period.
The Further Education Qualification that they now have to study for is called ‘The Qualified Teacher in Learning and Skills.’ Significantly it requires a period of induction just the same as does the new Qualified Teacher Status.
As from September, such an induction will be recognised as a transferable qualification. In other words it will be possible to work in Further Education and should you then work in schools you will not slide right down the ladder of experience in terms of pay and increments.
This marks an interesting development. Teachers who have made a similar move in the past have found themselves treated as a new teacher in terms of salary grades even though they could have been teaching for many years.
Teaching in F.E. has a wide range of options. You can indeed teach 16 year olds the traditional 6th form subjects, but you can also teach special needs students who can take qualifications for a number of years beyond 16. There are adults needing training in Literacy and numeracy. There are adults needing to learn English as a Foreign Language and there are any number of recreational classes in such diverse fields as pottery, using a digital camera, interior design as well as Languages, IT, Art and Textiles.
All of these courses require teachers. All of them are open to qualified teachers and the field of F.E. as a stop gap occupation for teachers returning from a spell of teaching abroad represents a significant area of employment now that one of the hidden penalties has been removed.
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Dyslexia is a mystery
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29 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Dyslexia is a mystery
Is there someone in your class who is a slow reader?
Is there someone in your class who has difficulty with spelling?
Is there someone in your class who has poor handwriting?
Have you got someone who mixes up b’s and d’s?
Do you have someone who has difficulty understanding time?
Do you have anyone who has difficulty taking notes or copying from the blackboard?
In any class of 7, 8 or 9 year olds the chances are that you will have a goodly crop of pupils like this.
The disturbing fact is that 10% of the population of the U.K. is affected by such symptoms because that is the statistic for children with dyslexia...or rather that is the figure claimed by an organisation called Dyslexia Action.
Such a claim suggests that in every class there could be at least three children with dyslexia, so you have to be very wary of such a statement.
The small print tells us that such a figure relates to sufferers of varying degrees. Furthermore the figure for severe dyslexia is much less. That is 4%, but such is the high profile that dyslexia commands, it means that you really do need to be on your guard for the symptoms.
Dyslexia affects the development of reading, writing and spelling. It is also said to result in low self esteem, lack of self confidence and behavioural difficulties.
Lack of self esteem and lack of self confidence are the new buzz words and it would be a rare day indeed when each and every pupil (and adult for that matter) did not find themselves in that situation.
What teachers cry out for is a check list to help them identify symptoms of dyslexia. They want a crib sheet that shows how dyslexia might be at the root of behavioural problems. As someone who spent a whole term with a very disruptive boy whose problems were all due to dyslexia, I speak from the heart. Despite being sure that this was the case, the boys mother, also a teacher, felt otherwise. She put it down to laziness.
Teachers do not want to be open to a second opinion like that that.
Back up staff, testing, advisory services and auxiliary staff are the new safety net. They help to identify many cases of dyslexia which previously went undetected.
However even when tests are sent off for identification and come back showing ‘positive symptoms,’ not all schools are in a position to provide multi-sensory teaching equipment. If this is the case in the U.K. just think what it is like in countries where the expenditure on schools is minimal.
This is what makes dyslexia so frightening for teachers.
Teachers are becoming far more adept at spotting the tell tale symptoms. Does a pupil confuse left and right? Have they an uncoordinated style of running? Do they have difficulty taking notes? But, once identified how do they deal with the coping strategies because not spotting the symptoms is considered a crime?
Not being able to administer enough help is frustrating.
I recently taught a creative writing class to adults. The most imaginative and creative member of the group was a young woman who wrote poetry. She did her homework regularly; read out her work with confidence and joined in all the group activities, and yet she regularly proclaimed that she was dyslexic. She backed up this claim by show me her dyslexia dictionary. In the class, all she asked was for the handouts to be in large print.
The confusion was not with her. The results were magnificent. No the confusion was with me. If she could succeed with this disorder which puts fear into the minds of teachers, what exactly were we guilty of?
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Striking at the heart of teaching
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22 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Striking at the heart of teaching.
If you teach abroad, - anywhere abroad, then one thing hits you right between the eyes. A teacher is a respected member of society. Everywhere you go you are introduced to people and treated as a person who is honest and has integrity. It is a good feeling. It makes you proud to be a teacher.
As someone who taught in the U.K. in the 1980’s this really does count for a lot.
Back then, I never told anyone what I did for a living. Relatives who drove trucks used to mock my spending powers. They knew that I could only afford to go out once a month on pay day. Not only was the pay low, but the image was low as well. Male teachers were depicted as wearing leather patches on the elbows of their jackets. The profession was not attractive. It was seen as the second choice for many college students.
Since then a lot has changed. Salaries have risen 15% in real terms in 10 years. Now the average salary is £31,000 for a secondary teacher and £28,000 for a primary teacher. Salaries can reach £60,000 for a classroom teacher and some super-heads earn £100,000. When you compare this to a nurse earning £23,000; a plumber earning £25,000; someone in sales earning £30,000 and chartered accountants earning £40,000, then the job of being a teacher is attractive.
Achieving a state of parity with other professions has been a long haul. It has wobbled between thought of as a job where the working week was cited as being lower than that of others and the holidays longer. (The quotes were 27 working hours a week and 13 weeks holiday, whereas in reality marking and lesson preparation took the working week to 50 hours.) Alternatively it has striven to be counted as a profession. Teachers do have to constantly re-evaluate the curriculum, attend seminars, attend conferences and undergo training updates. Most of all they have learned to work closer with parents and develop a standing in the community. Now the image is much better.
As with anything to do with salaries, the status quo is fragile.
The 3 year pay settlement offered to teachers in 2008 was made up of 2.45% in the first year, 2.3% in the second year and 2.3% in the third. This is now considered to be less than inflation and has prompted talk of a one day strike.
The last time teachers came out on strike was in 1987.
Unfortunately, strike action and teachers do not fit easily together.
Teachers are not forbidden to strike but they are, in the words of the educational writer Edward Blishen “a right soft lot.”
First of all you have to remember that teaching is a female dominated profession. Six out of seven primary teachers are women. Traditionally they have been reluctant to strike.
Secondly not all teachers are in a union.
Also, there are two unions in teaching. There is the main National Union of Teachers and the smaller National Union of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers. The latter has traditionally been more militant. (It grew out of an all male membership union in the days before equal opportunities legislation.)
The head teachers also have their own union. It is called The National Union of Head Teachers.
This mix makes voting for strike action a messy business.
I well remember working in a small church school in central London, when a one day strike was called. The staff consisted of six teachers and a head-master. Five of the teachers were in the N.U.T. They were told to take a day off school to attend a rally in Trafalgar Square. My union told me to go on strike in sympathy leaving the head no option but to close the school.
I duly went the rally in Trafalgar Square, but the other 5 teachers went into school anyway and the headmaster took my class. It was a classic example of the lack of ruthlessness that teachers have when it comes making a pay claim.
Were teacher’s intent on taking advantage of their privileged position as educators and adjudicators, they would take a leaf out of the book of Arthur Scargill and the miner’s strike in the Thatcher era.
The miner’s chief weapon was the so called set of ‘Flying Pickets.’ They were able turn up at selected pits at a moments notice, and most significantly without the prior knowledge of the police.
Translate that tactic into sporadic strikes in selected schools in the examination period and the whole ‘GCSE’ and ‘A Level’ exam programme would be in chaos.
I worked in Harare when there was a mix up in exam dates for a set of City & Guilds exams. The maths papers were issued at one school when the rest of the city was taking its English test. By 4.15 photocopies of both exams were on sale in Mbari market. That evening everyone was swatting up the answers in advance for the next days exam.
Knowing that makes it vital for teachers pay to stay in a state of equilibrium.
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A kind of teaching you are never trained in.
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15 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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A kind of teaching you are never trained in.
No one ever gets trained in how to teach out of doors.
I have known junior teachers who have organised a treasure hunt for young pupils; I have seen classes doing mapping exercises in a village high street relating to their geography studies; I have heard of secondary school teachers who have sent rockets into the sky in science lessons.
For my own part I have taken children out to inspect the results of a small dam that was breached after a storm. We went to study the force of water. I have taken children outside to study an odd phenomenon, namely a circular rainbow. I even remember giving up the unequal struggle of gaining attention when a small plane circled the farm next to the school. It was crop spraying. So we went out to watch.
However, most of these lessons were done on the spur of the moment or at short notice. They were not time-tabled as a regular event.
When teaching in hot countries such a lesson can be built into the curriculum.
I had half an hour of PSHE out on the grass after a literacy hour and numeracy hour twice a week. It broke up the routine and helped sustain concentration. It happened at the best part of the day and the sunshine was predictable. The infant school teacher finished off her day with a story under the tree next to the school gate, and the week ended with an assembly outdoors under the flagpole. The final activity in that school was a hearty rendering of the national anthem.
Sadly the scope for doing something similar in the U.K. is limited. Take a look at any school playground. It is usually open to the elements. It is usually wide open to the wind. It is usually wide open to the snow, and wide open to the rain. In short there is no cover.
If there were it would be perfectly feasible to take some of the lessons outside.
However, even if you have a mind to incorporate a little bit of fresh air into the lesson you still need to establish a few basic ground rules.
Sporting activities aplenty take place in the open air and they have their sets of rules.
We had a set of three cricket nets positioned side by side. They managed to produce any number of near-misses and helped underline the need for safety.
When running cross country races we had a seating plan for those who had finished. This helped us to understand the need for organisation.
When we organised the swimming gala at the open air swimming pool we had a points system based on the contribution of those who had not been picked for the house teams. Each pupil gained a point for their house if they just swam a length in the preliminary heats. That helped everyone to understand the need for co-operation.
Such were the ground rules for sport. There was a similar set for lessons out in the open.
We had a code of practice for carrying chairs properly. Obviously we arranged our seats in a circle, but out of doors it was so much easier for small groups of children to work far away from the main group, and they had to carry them about without causing accidents.
We had clear signal for regrouping. We set out areas we were going to work in. We set down levels of acceptable behaviour and of acceptable co-operation. In my school we even had a correct procedure for dealing with animals. This meant that we would not be distracted by monkeys but we might be distracted by mosquitoes and we would move if there were some red ants crawling up the chairs.
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Qualifying to become a teacher in the U.K. - a guide.
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10 / 04 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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A guide to the tangled web of training to become a teacher.
The classic way to train as a teacher goes like this.
Once you have decided that you want to become a teacher, you work in a school for a year as an unqualified teacher. This enables you to work alongside experienced teachers in the classroom seeing how they work and picking up the tricks of the trade.
At the end of that exercise you go on to get a teaching degree and come back to start a teaching career.
It sounds quite straight-forward. It should be straight-forward but the tangled web of recent options makes the procedures for gaining the updated appropriate qualifications seem very complicated. So let’s start at the very beginning.
There are a variety of terms to describe the job of being an unqualified teacher. You can be called a classroom assistant, a teaching assistant a learning support assistant or a non teaching assistant.
Some schools will take on people because they think they have enough experience working with children. Others will need you to have GCSE qualifications. The most common requirement is that you have GCSE qualifications in Maths and English or their equivalent. To be put on a higher grade you would need to have a qualification like a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) in ‘Supporting Teaching and Learning in schools’ at Level 2. This qualification is also available at Level 3 and some schools may look for this. All Local Authorities will also expect unqualified teachers to take part in a 4 day Teaching Assistants Induction Programme. There is also a category of teaching assistant called a Higher Level Teaching Assistant and the training for this is through a Local Authority and will be through the recommendation of a head teacher once you are involved in teaching in a school.
Many would be teachers who are absolutely sure that they want to make teaching their profession by-pass all of the unqualified categories and go straight on to take a degree.
That degree can be in Education – hence the term B.Ed. It is an honours degree and can take up to 4 years. You can also take a B.A. degree with a teaching component or a B.Sc. with a teaching component.
Alternatively you can take a degree in your chosen subject of interest and then complete a one year ‘Post Graduate Certificate in Education’. All of these confer on you the ability to teach in U.K. state schools and this is now categorised as having Qualified Teacher Status.
Such a status is confusing because all previous qualifications such as B.Ed. and Post Graduate Teaching Certificates automatically incorporated that status.
The real aim of the Qualified Teacher Status is to create a professional data base on teachers which validates their standards of teaching but more importantly it makes sure that teachers continue with some form of professional development.
Similarly the term ‘Initial Teacher Training’ is being incorporated into descriptions relating to qualifications. This too is an added confusion, because it relates to the theory and practice of teaching. Teaching Practice has always played a major part in teacher training. It has often taken the form of a placement in a school. These components continue to be embedded in all forms of educational degrees.
When it comes to taking these courses, there has been a real explosion in the way you can take these qualifications.
Whereas the first option was always to be trained on a full time basis, there are now any numbers of variations. You can study part time or via a ‘distance learning’ package. Courses can be employment based and some are tailored to individuals.
They are not taken up in much volume but describing them makes the options seem like a hotchpotch of flexibility.
The prime example is the Post Graduate Certificate in Education. This normally takes one year studying full time or two years part time, but there are other niche routes.
One is called ‘Schools Centred Initial Teacher Training’. On this scheme graduates work on designated neighbourhood schools and colleges. They normally last for a year and lead to the designation of that term again – Qualified Teacher Status. In other words it is a teaching certificate.
The ‘Graduate Teacher Programme’ places graduates in schools, who again qualify whilst in the classroom. They are paid as unqualified teachers or qualified teachers depending on their experience. Another form of upgrading from an unqualified teacher status to teacher is through a scheme called ‘The Registered Teacher Programme’. It takes two years and is part ‘on the job training’ and part academic study.
There is also a scheme called ‘Teach First’. It is run by an independent organisation enabling top graduates to spend 2 years working in challenging secondary school in London, Manchester and the Midlands. Entrants qualify as a teacher whilst completing leadership training and work experience with leading employers. It is for high flying graduates who may not otherwise have considered teaching or are not sure about it as a long term career.
The University of Gloucester School of Education has pioneered a ‘Qualified Teacher Status Only’ qualification which is achieved through submitting a portfolio of evidence. It is for graduates who have substantial teaching experience at an unqualified level.
All of these sub divisions are part of a quest to make qualifying as a teacher fit in with the need to entice people who are mature or in work and cannot afford to abandon work for full time study.
Given that teaching can be the best job in the world, for those who can find their way through all the alternative options it is a task worth doing.
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Thats the way to do it - according to a behaviour guru
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25 / 03 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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That’s the way to do it - according to a behaviour guru.
I was teaching in a small school close to the Ugandan Border. A colleague came into the classroom to take some photographs of the school and the pupils. As an afterthought she took one of me sitting at the desk in the corner.
The flash went off. The comment was, “I’ll send this one off to my friend as an example of old fashioned teaching.”
I don’t suppose for one moment, it was meant to be cruel but all teachers constantly evaluate their own teaching. After all, teaching is a career in which techniques fluctuate almost as much as fashion, and I had been through the valley of doubt that afflicts most teachers on many an occasion. Once again I found myself wondering. Was I doing it right?
At times like this it is often useful to reflect back over your experience of working with other teachers. They can act as markers of good teaching.
In my own career I had seen the flamboyant ones, the strict ones, the motherly ones, the organised ones, the chaotic ones, the fun ones and the ones who made it look easy.
In some ways too much observation is pointless because unless you are the complete actor we all know that we can not change our temperament. I for one could not change mine.
The very first school I taught at was a small school next to Armley Jail in Leeds. The headmaster remarked that he felt it a privilege to teach and indeed said that he would do it for nothing if he could afford it. His small piece of wisdom was that he taught all children as if they were his own.
Ironically, the next head teacher, who worked in a small church school near the Elephant and Castle, had a similar philosophy. He also pointed out that the behaviour of children in school was rarely different from that at home.
Both had that benign presence that made you realise that they were in charge; they both had infinite patience and both put learning at the forefront of all of their teaching.
When it came to charisma, there was no greater exponent than a head teacher in Zimbabwe. His assemblies were like a firework display and his lessons were brilliant. He chalked the numbers of Phi all along the blackboard and around the walls of the classroom to show that they did not recur. He divided up cakes to illustrate points about fractions, all with the hitch of his trousers to show that he meant business. Yet despite the showmanship his record keeping was immaculate and he knew the individual limitations of every pupil in the class.
My very first class mentor started each day with a joke. My college graduate friend was a master of the positive attitude.
All of them helped shape my teaching persona. I put them into the mix just as a music hall entertainer crafted their act. My teaching was not an exact copy of all their styles, more a back stop when analysing the lessons that went wrong.
They also served as a reassuring check list when lined up alongside the mantra of educational guru John Bayley.
He recently listed the following points for successful teaching.
1. Be positive.
2. Give direction and choice
3. Don’t invite confrontation
4. Teach great lessons
5. Treat pupils like your own kids
6. Recognition is important
7. Set the controls
8. Make someone’s day
9. Have some fun
10. Think about the body language
Most reassuring of all was the homily that stated the obvious. He said “remember, you are the adult, they are the children and you are in charge.”
The odd thing is that we all know these facts to be useful building blocks for good teaching. Why then do we elevate the people who list them to the level of Guru? It seems to me that we are all capable of being a guru if only we had the time to write it in a book.
Why not send us your ten points for successful teaching and we will publish them in otn?
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Qualifications Quagmire
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20 / 03 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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A quagmire of qualifications
‘O’ Levels and ’A’ Levels were once the backbone of the English educational system.
Not so long ago it was quite normal for a pupil to take 5 or 6 ‘O’ Levels together with a range of other courses that were not examined. Not any more. More is better is now the mantra and with each successive fashion comes another subject to be added to the basket of studies.
No longer is it enough to have Maths and English alongside a trio of subjects which take your fancy. No, Science is the new god; Languages the passport to trade; History the guide to wisdom gleaned from past mistakes; Religion needs to be incorporated to create peaceful worldwide coexistence. Add to that list IT because it is the universal language of communication. Then you need cookery, citizenship, music, drama, sex education and sport. Suddenly the week is just not long enough.
It is all part of a belief that by definition 12 GCSE’s must be better than 6, and so the relentless pursuit of qualifications goes on, mixed in with a tacit belief that the examinations themselves are getting easier.
Some institutions are beginning to say that enough is enough...literally.
Admissions tutors at Oxford and Cambridge say that they are only interested in applicants having up to 8 GCSE’s. The head of Eton College has advocated cutting the number down to 5 or 6 and Bedale Independent School has capped its subjects to 5.
However, if you think that a bout of clear thinking is sweeping the corridors of education, then think again. One tier up from the jungle of GCSE’s there is a fog surrounding just what it is that constitutes a good school education.
‘A’ levels still exist, as the staple diet of a 6th form. They are spread over 70 subjects and are taken by over 250000 students each year but not in their original format. Now the first year is counted as an AS qualification and an AS2 qualification or ‘A’ level at the end of the 2nd year.
Starting in September 2008 a new generation of Vocational “Specialist Diplomas” will become available. They aim to replace GCSE’s and will be called foundation diplomas. These are for students aged 14 – 16. There will also be a replacement for “A” levels. This will be called the Higher Diploma and will be the equivalent of seven GCSE’s at good grades. The first five subjects will be in engineering, construction, IT, media and health. and these will grow to 17 subjects in the next five years.
Also being introduced as a rival to ‘A’ level exams is the new Pre-U diploma. It is accredited by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and originates from the University of Cambridge International Examinations board. This is targeted at the brightest students. It has already being tested in 30 schools and with 1000 pupils.
Another breakaway movement has resulted in a greater take-up of the International Baccalaureate. Over 100 schools in England have joined the 32000 students in over 100 countries world wide who now study for it. This qualification is set by a Swiss examinations board and is now considered to be more rigorous than other qualifications. Students sit six subjects, three at standard level and three at a higher level. The curriculum is spread over two years. Top achievers consider their marks to be the equivalent of six A grades and an AS level.
All of this is very paradoxical because the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority was tasked with clearing up the jungle of qualifications that has existed in the secondary sector for a long time.
From a teachers point of view it makes for a very complicated set of expectations that schools can be looking for at interview.
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They don’t sit still any more
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13 / 03 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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They don’t sit still any more.
A teacher is someone who stands in front of a class passing down the received wisdom of the world. That is the age old image, but it is a myth.
For the past 50 years trained teachers, in Britain at least, have known that that is the least stimulating way of teaching. It might be god for the ego but pupils certainly don’t sit there in a mixture of awe and expectation giving that type of lesson their full attention.
I have been to countless seminars where class management gurus have explained to us how to reconfigure the classroom furniture so that children worked in groups at their cluster of desks and the teacher by definition circulated around the class. We have explored the value of communication by working in groups, in pairs and by explaining our work in the form of a presentation to a small group.
We have had discussion groups, interview groups and demonstrations.
The concept of doing a project is very, very old, but at its core is the idea of working away from the all seeing eye of the teacher at the front of the class. Some of the results have been memorable.
I have seen project books on wildlife that were worthy of publication. They were made by a group of children who had spent a week in a game reserve. I have seen guide books compiled after a day out by the river Thames in Gravesend, and also seen historical booklets put together after a visit to Hampton Court which grew out of the answers to a class questionnaire.
Little children have done shop surveys in their village, and older ones have traced the origins of goods in the supermarket.
I have witnessed a charismatic maths teacher explain the concept of ratio by getting children to ride their bicycles around the playground using different gears and then measure the distances travelled at each turn of the pedal. I have seen another chalk the un-recurring numbers of pye around the classroom and bring the decimal point to life by using a tennis ball alongside number squares. They stick in the memory.
In one classroom I watched as the caretaker came in to take out the class television.....only to stimulate the class into writing descriptions of the thief in their story who robbed a bank.
When it comes to reading their own work or recounting what they have read some classes hardly needed the direction or presence of a teacher.
We now await the extent to which an interactive whiteboard can be used to stimulate learners.
It never ceased to amaze me how creative children can be with just a set of boxes and some scissors and paper. Many an Aztec temple and Norman castle has evolved from a cardboard box and most have been to scale.
In one cramped classroom in East London I saw 50 children make scale models of ships and planes from packs of balsa wood that could have graced a draftsman’s office.
Given a box of paper, tinsel, scraps of material and cardboard, I have seen teenagers concoct a fashion parade worthy of Givenchy and what’s more they even did a good replica of a cat walk fashion show.
I have witnessed plays by nine year olds, put together in just a few minutes on the theme of befriending new children in school, which were just as good as the end of year school play.
Countless class assemblies have incorporated drama, dance and a demonstration on such varied topics as the germs carried by flies, how to greet people in French and how to cross a busy road.
Long gone are the days when the teacher sat at a desk at the front of a class, so deeply ingrained is the need to make all teaching stimulating.
But spare a thought for all of those teachers who find themselves teaching in a third world country.
What do you do when whole class teaching is the norm?
What do you do when there are 100 children in the class and there literally isn’t enough room to swing a cat never mind enact a play?
And what do you do when that is the expected mode of teaching from adults and children alike?
Such are the trials and tribulations of teaching abroad. They are the rewards too because such situations teach you that you just can not take anything for granted in the world of teaching...not even stimulating teaching.
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Oh no. It’s our fault again
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06 / 03 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Oh no! It’s our fault again.
All teachers dread national campaigns, especially literacy campaigns, because no matter how laudable the aims, it is the poor old teacher who always gets the blame.
The latest one called quick reads is a case in point. It aims to get adults and children reading together.
The promotional style is a tried and trusted formula. A rugby star admits that he could not read when he left school. It was only when his own children were diagnosed with dyslexia that he realises that he too has dyslexia. The children spark in him an interest in books and now he has just polished off a Harry Potter book in 6 days.
That’s good going but the implied blame lies with his early school teacher.
A mother in a large town in the midlands said she used to miss school because she saw it as a waste of time. She had dyslexia and left school not being able to sign her name, read letters, or even read the labels on food packets. Now her children are having problems reading at school.
Where does the fault lie? The teacher of course.
The link between illiterate parents and the likelihood that their children will not be able to read is well documented. In 2001 the government started a scheme to teach adults and children in schools. The aim was to help parents to help their children with homework. This was appropriate because of the new national curriculum. It not only emphasised literacy but it had also introduced new ways of doing maths.
This scheme has enjoyed a good deal of success. Five million adults have passed through various literacy and numeracy schemes in 7 years, and a good deal of training has gone on behind the scenes to train staff.
Anyone who has undergone any training in disability will be aware, all too aware, that it is the teachers’ duty to spot dyslexia, hearing impairments, mental illness, and any visual impairment. What’s more they have to act on it; otherwise they are open to accusations of negligence.
This really is a lopsided way of looking at the problem. How many times do you hear of people with some learning problem, be it poor eyesight, poor hearing, or even reading difficulties hiding the fact from teachers and not disclosing it on entry forms.
In later life they will admit to making endless excuses that they had lost their glasses or forgotten books.
Any teacher will tell you that when parents, children and teachers are all of a like mind about the value of education, then in professional terms, teaching becomes a pure pleasure. All teachers are aware of the difficulties that children in their class encounter, but it needs to be a transaction not a one way street.
Admittedly much of the work with adults over the past 35 years had played on the need to get rid of any stigma attached to illiteracy in adults. Now that many of them are recognising the same difficulties in their children it is to be hoped that that stigma has vanished.
There needs to be cooperation between parents and children who need extra help and schools. The more cooperation there is, then the greater the likelihood that the school will be able to pay for expert advice. They could also benefit by getting more diagnostic equipment.
All of this has to better than taking the easy option of always blaming the teacher.
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Report to me
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26 / 02 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Report to me.
When Easter arrives you know that the season of tests is not far away and in its wake comes the time to write reports.
Time was when reports were no more than a set of marks which ended with a sentence from the class teacher and an even shorter sentence from the head teacher. The all important factor was your position in the class shown as a fraction.
In later years the need for comments grew like topsey, asking for comments on Maths English, General Knowledge and even general behaviour. That included attitude to school and work, personality and in some cases abilities in sports.
This was all very well for teachers who had a way with words. I for one never had much difficulty describing the high flyers in class. I never found it hard stringing together a description of the extraverts in the class. I never had to reach for a thesaurus when writing about children who struggled with number and syntax and could empathise with those who had trouble remembering facts.
Unfortunately, in every class there are children who sit right in the middle. They are neither gifted nor slow. They are neither bright nor do they need help. They are neither prodigious in their work nor do they struggle. They are in short average and in many cases display very few distinguishing characteristics in class.
Writing their report is always a struggle.
Fifteen years ago, a teacher in Zambia gave me a set of photocopied sheets on her retirement.
“Have these” she said.”I won’t need them anymore but they saved me a lot of time.”
How right she was!
There were 6 pages of comments on just the topics that were listed in the reports, and whats more they were graded.
An exemplary pupil came at the head of the list.
Unteachable came at the bottom. There was plenty of variety in between.
These were the general comments and it was the same for Maths, English, History and Geography and Sport.
I found it an invaluable aid and still regret passing it on when I left that country, even though I always felt that something as obviously useful as that must be educationally flawed.
But no!
On the website http://www.teachervision.fen.com what should I find but 2 pages of Report Card Comments and Phrases categorised under personality and attitudes.
This report card is a reflection of **********’s attitude in school. He could improve if he decided to work harder and cooperate more.
Under the heading personality there are prompts like – is self confident and has excellent manners and - is a very thoughtful student.
Under the heading participation there are prompts like – is willing to take part in all classroom activities and speaks with confidence in a group.
As for attitude, the guidelines were just as succinct. Shows initiative and thinks things through, and assumes responsibility well, were reminders of my own prompt sheet.
I for one am glad that such report card comments are still available. They are not a substitute for thinking; they are not a substitute for not knowing about the children you teach. They help to stimulate thought when writers block strikes. When it comes to writing reports writers block is a very common event.
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Open source resources
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05 / 02 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Open source resources.
http://www.teachingideas.co.uk
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk
http://www.teach-ict.com
http://www.primaryresources.co.uk
http://www.byteachers.org.uk
http://www.schoolzone.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn
http://www.teacherstv
Resources on line is a growth area, but one that can gobble up a lot of time and lead to a good deal of frustration.
Just as you think you are getting to the perfect set of work sheets that you need you can be asked to become a fee paying member before you can download the very papers you want. It is not a tantalising prospect for teachers who spend a lot of time preparing lessons in the first place.
Putting the results of teachers work up for sale in not un-natural, indeed some of us have been grateful that we can buy text books on line, but there is another school of thought that is gaining ground.
http://www.curriki.org is coming at the problem from an entirely different direction. Curriki exists to collect high quality curriculum resources from across the globe and make them freely available. Under the umbrella of a ‘global education and learning community’ teachers are invited to share their resources.
This is a potentially huge vision. It is the brainchild of Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems and an evangelist for “open source” a system where everyone contributes to the greater good of the project.
It offers a counterpoint to the Microsoft concept of owning the means of spreading information.
The goal of curriki is simply to eliminate the education divide.
It has its roots in America and therefore much of the material is focussed upon the American Curriculum.
A Michigan maths teacher has created a worksheet to be distributed to high school students who are learning about Box and Whisper plots. Another teacher has collected a variety of student friendly teaching resources to introduce a poetry unit on ‘The Odyssey’.
A school librarian has put the bibliographies of all her non fiction science books on show because she wants to keep children interested in the potential range of science books.
Interestingly each of these citations has a direct link to access them.
As for the name. That is simply an amalgam. “wiki” is a type of online software that allows members of the community to collaborate between themselves. The best known example is Wikipedia the online encyclopaedia. Combine this word with curriculum and you have the word Curriki.
http://www.curriki.org is the web address for the interactive on line service (“Curriki Website”) operated by Curriki, The Global Educational Learning Community on the World Wide Web of the Internet, consisting of information services and content provided by Curriki and other 3rd parties.
That is the bland mission statement. It doesn’t sound spectacular but it could well be the start of a brave new world for teachers.
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Languages for all
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05 / 02 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
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Languages for all
For far too long we have failed to value language skills. This has led to a cycle of national underperformance in languages, a shortage of teachers and a workforce unable to meet the demands of a global economy. So says the department for Children, Schools and Families and it represents a massive opportunity for teachers working abroad who are thinking of returning to the U.K. to teach.
There is a shortage of modern foreign language teachers at secondary level and relatively few primary teachers have been trained to teach foreign languages.
That is the situation in Britain and the government aims to change it but there is hardly a consensus of support for the changes that are proposed. The Government has now said that all primary schools will teach a foreign language from the age of seven within the next three years. A recent report by The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) stated that 70% of primary schools do teach a foreign language. Nearly all teach French, and a significant number teach Spanish, but the biggest difficulty is finding enough time to fit it into the curriculum.
Another complaint is that those who do get taught are wasting their time because information is not passed on to secondary schools. As a result, children who have been learning a foreign language are usually put into groups with others who have not been taught a foreign language and the whole class starts from square one.
Research did show that too many schools and teachers are working in isolation. Many work without access to support networks such as specialist language colleges and CILT The National Centre for Languages, but it is tempting to say that it was ever thus.
In the 1960’s The Nuffield Foundation sponsored an experimental French language programme in Primary Schools. It failed because there were not enough good and imaginative teachers to teach foreign languages. Secondly, it was claimed that language was complicated enough for younger children coping with mastering their mother tongue. Such an argument is at odds with continental European thinking. In Holland they start learning foreign languages at the age of five. In Belgium they have activities in foreign languages from as early as three.
Choosing that foreign language in multicultural Britain is always going to be a problem. In many inner city areas English is the second language so learning a foreign language like French is in fact the third language.
At the heart of all the learning will be the style of teaching. Some systems prefer an understanding of the syntax of language with a good grounding of grammar. Others are happy to concentrate on functional phrases.
As usual there are a lot of bland statements in the new government strategy. It states that it will create the appetite for learning a foreign language and it will broaden and enrich the options available. It even states that there will be 3 overarching principles. The first will be to learn from what works. The second will be to build capacity throughout the system which in reality should mean more resources for languages in schools. The third principle states that they will work with professionals to introduce and improve language learning.
There are some hard commitments in amongst the generalisations.
The government will develop new training opportunities for teaching a foreign language to support people with language skills.
The government will increase the number of language colleges from 157 to 200.
Specialist language teachers will be recruited by schools to work with a cluster of neighbouring schools.
Existing primary teachers with an interest or background in languages will have the opportunity to take part in professional development or retrain in order to deliver language teaching.
The message they wish to underline is that they are determined to ensure that languages take their proper place at the heart of the school curriculum.
It represents an important opportunity for teachers who have worked abroad to stake a claim to working in a school which i
