Your say / Education
Let’s start to back our teachers in 2015
This comment article is written by education journalist Linda Tanner
“What did you do at school today?”
“Nuffink.”
“Why are you still in bed when you should be doing your homework?”
“The teacher didn’t set us any.”
These sorts of conversations, familiar for many decades, ought to happen less often in the digital age. Many infant schools put out photos on social media to show mums and dads what their tinies are getting up to in the classroom, while an app detailing work to be completed outside school hours and deadlines for submitting it aims to keep parents, students and teachers fully in the picture (and is proving popular and successful in many Bristol secondaries).
Whether you are seeking a reception class place – by January 15, as if you needed reminding – or are supporting a teenager applying to university – deadline ditto – there is no end to the information available about what your offspring will be learning.
In the run-up to the general election in May, we will also no doubt hear a great deal about what our children should and should not be taught.
Yet generalised parental anxiety about education remains.
Amid all these words, is there enough recognition of what teachers actually do?
Everyone has an opinion about education, mostly based on what happened when we and/or our children went to school.
Yet if you spend time in any educational establishment, you quickly realise that a lot of the pronouncements from politicians of all levels and parties – not to mention Ofsted – bear little resemblance to the day-to-day realities of life for children, teachers and support staff.
People who work in schools require, according to one leading blogger, “tenacity, dedication and rigour”.
Ministers want pupils to learn resilience; role models are there in lessons every day.
School leaders and staff achieve some amazing outcomes. Particular recognition this month must go to Bannerman Road Community Academy, rated good by inspectors after many years of being a struggling primary school, and Bedminster Down School, judged good for the first time.
Superb individual success stories can also be found in every school, often against considerable odds.
But teachers pay a high price for their devotion. A tenth of the profession – 43,000 people – have responded to the Department for Education survey on workload.
News that the Government has agreed to set up a College of Teaching – a campaign spearheaded by Bristol North West MP Charlotte Leslie – is therefore welcome. Its aim of protecting standards and restoring the status of the teaching profession is a resolution for 2015 that is in the interests of everyone.
Picture: Areipa.lt/Shutterstock
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