Secret teacher: you can't put a price on education

Who gets to decide what schools should spent their money? asks today's Secret Teacher. Photograph: Alamy

In times of economic hardship, teachers and schools feel the sharp pain of cuts to school budgets and pay freezes – both personally and professionally.

As teachers plan further strikes over cuts to our pensions, the introduction of performance-related pay and workloads, I can't help but consider the concept of cost and worth.

I have worked in two schools during my teaching career, the first in a particularly economically and socially-deprived area. This school had serious money: with an above average number of students on free school meals, it enjoyed a hefty pupil premium.

But how was the money spent? Well, cynical staff would point to the extensive refurbishments, the head teacher's new office, the seemingly needless conference room and its distinct corporate image.

These things shouldn't be ignored – they raise interesting questions about why schools feel the need to run themselves like a business (this was not an academy). But what else was money spent on? Counselling, anger management, out-of-school programmes to integrate students into the community and boost their self-esteem, trips anywhere and everywhere, and a sports day where the whole school was shipped to a huge stadium so every student could watch or take part.

What's the value of these experiences for vulnerable children? Priceless. The word enrichment is thrown around a lot, but on one school trip to the Lake District several children were astounded by the experience as they'd never left their home community before. In some instances these opportunities go beyond the clinical term enrichment and become once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

The second school I worked in was as an academy in an extremely wealthy area. The number of pupils it had on free school meals was below average – and, boy, did we know about it.

At one point nothing could be photocopied, lest we exceed our department budget. When sports day came around, only students who were competing could go. Trips could be attended only if parents paid the full amount, and I never enjoyed any training or development because there was just no money.

When I raised the issue about how money could be spent more effectively to help pupils, the staff scoffed. The suggestion of anger management classes were met with sarcastic responses – and my other ideas didn't fare any better. It's perhaps no coincidence that this school has a very top-heavy senior management team, and mostly hires NQTs.

So here's my big question: who gets to decide what schools should spend their money on and what's education for? I would hope the majority of teachers agree that education isn't just about results. What we want students who leave our classrooms and schools to go home with isn't just good grades.

Many variables affect how well students perform, not least home life and attitude to education. To what extent is it fair to hold teachers responsible for their pupils' achievements? I've taught students who are capable of achieving the elusive C at GCSE but because of their own attitudes, lack of support from home, low confidence – the list could go on – they don't reach their potential. In fact, despite the lack of funds, the academy mentioned above still enjoyed better results – the achievement gap saw to that.

As teachers, what do we do for these young people if we don't get the exam results? We accept them, we encourage them, we motivate and support, we listen, we make them laugh and forget their troubles, even if only for 10 minutes. When I do those things, that's when I feel I have achieved – when my "performance" is at its best – but what's that worth?

Schools need to think carefully about who they spend their money on. Staffing and performance-related pay gives schools the opportunity to justify paying experienced members of staff less than they are worth based on the performance of their classes, which is only half the job.

Today's Secret Teacher works at a secondary school in the north of England.

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Secret Teacher: why is no one defending the teaching profession?

The Secret Teacher feels it's time for the teaching unions to call national, prolonged strike action across the country. Photograph: Alamy

Dear Stephen Twigg and the teaching unions,

Where is your opposition? Michael Rosen is challenging the current system more effectively, seemingly single-handedly, than your combined efforts.

Do you remember us? We're teachers and educators, those people you represent and are supposed to fight for. Many of us are unhappy, yet no one seems to care outside our sector. Many of us are being intimidated by the government and Ofsted. Our schools are being forcibly turned into academies. We're seeing long-respected colleagues being put onto capability, or become ill with stress and pressure. We're constantly being threatened with larger classes and less money. We're always blamed for society's ills; from the riots to child obesity and teenage pregnancies. We are a convenient political scapegoat.

All that is heard from government is negative rhetoric. The message that comes through loud and clear to the public is that we are failing our children and standards are falling. The reality is our education system is actually pretty effective; sixth in the world, don't you know? I don't think the government publishes this statistic too much. It doesn't seem to suit to circulate positive stories about our profession.

Why don't we hear you Mr Twigg in the media standing up for us, arguing vociferously against Mr Gove's constant new initiatives, or exposing his sham surveys? Why don't you protect us from Michael Wilshaw's latest attack or threat to us and ask difficult questions in parliament? Expose their propaganda for what it really is. We need you to be strong. Are you afraid of them?

Teaching unions, I pay you money I cannot really afford, but you only seem to react when backed into a corner. You have been too slow and have seemed to leave the fight to people on the frontline, rather than backing them with confident, assertive campaigns. We need you to battle assertively now.

Where is the cohesion in your organisations? It seems to be pot luck as to whether or not you happen to be in a well-organised, motivated region. We're lucky at my school we've got well informed, assertive reps but they can't act in a vacuum. They come back from regional meetings frustrated by the ingrained inert behaviour and the soporific, unimportant discussions. There is a huge need and desire to fight now, not just against the injustices facing our colleagues but against the damage covertly being done to our children's education.

The unions need to call national, prolonged strike action and call for it across the country. If there was a clear, political narrative, stressing that this action is to repel Tory attacks on children and teachers, the public would be with us and union membership would shoot up and we would see results. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is showing the way forward far better than any teaching union is.

We had a lunchtime demo outside our school to support our colleagues in the north west when they went out on strike. We had Gove masks, the local NUT banner, a Save Our Schools banner and flags. We were amazed at the amount of people who tooted and cheered us as they drove past, in both council vehicles, private company vehicles and private cars. People stopped and talked to us in the street and one gentleman from Africa said he was amazed that Britain, seen by so many as a civilised country, was selling its public services off to the private money men. It was so uplifting.

I am not saying that a national, prolonged strike, say one day per week, would win immediately, and I know that the majority of the press and certainly the Labour Party, would attack us viciously. But if we held true, we'd win. I am accused of being an idealist sometimes but I am sick of being cowed and scared in my job. What do we have to lose? The Tories are privatising education and it is a national scandal. They are vicious but weak. We need our unions to be strong and courageous.

This week's Secret Teacher works at a primary school in the south east of England.

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Secret Teacher: our students are much more than levels and data

The Secret Teachers' pupils respond better to feedback than graphs and levels. Photograph: Alamy

The school I teach in is challenging and many students appear to make slow progress when measured by the crude metric of national curriculum levels, which of course academies and free schools are not bound by.

Levels give a rudimentary measure of pupils' progress at best, and allow snap judgements of students, teachers and, thanks to Ofsted, schools. They tell us little or nothing about the sometimes small, incremental steps that pupils and teachers make every day.

I know that what is valued most by pupils is feedback. I know from my conversations with students over many years that the process of learning and progress is a complex and highly personalised one. It is not simply about data and analysis.

Let me give you an example. The senior leadership team (SLT) are doing lesson observations. An experienced deputy headteacher is observing. He notes that a young teacher has the pupils' rapt attention as she outlines the task. The class, who are far from easy, are fully engaged as they start their group work.

Progress in the lesson is good and I pick on a couple of students to talk to. The conversation goes as follows:

"Do you know what level you are at?"
"Level 5a."
"What's your target for this year?"
"Level 5c"
"What do you have to do to get there?"
"Work harder."

I change tack with the next student and ask to look at his book. In it the teacher's excellent diagnostic marking is full of recognition of the things that the student can do and advice on how he can improve.

"How do you think you are doing?"
"Well, I can use the present tense quite well but I need to try and use the perfect and future tenses more."
"How do you know that?"
"Well, miss has written it in my book and she spoke to me earlier about it."

Later on that day, the assistant headteacher responsible for data hands me sheets for the curriculum areas I manage. Each student, in each subject, has been levelled by his teacher. Each painstakingly produced spreadsheet has every student labelled by level and how much progress he has made from key stage 2. Some have made good progress; others appear to have fared less well. Patterns can be discerned of progress in various subjects, plans are drawn up and 'difficult conversations' planned.

All of the above is meat and drink to anyone in every secondary school in England and has been for the vast majority of my 22 years in teaching. Still though, I have a sense of unease. In my school, as in every other, we have complicated and robust systems for the production and analysis of levels of attainment, megabytes of data are available for each and every pupil and for every possible group within the students.

Far too often levels are an easy way to make summative judgements of a process that is ongoing. Any formative impact they may have gets lost in a welter of jargon and cliche which, while it is present on most classroom walls, means little or nothing to students. The thought of using them to allocate performance-related pay fills me with more terror than I can say.

Surely we can do much better than this? Each and every student we have is an individual and will make progress in a different way and at varying pace. Surely the 'soft' data from a teacher and his/her knowledge of a student's talent will tell us more about their progress than 'hard' levels.

Let's free ourselves from this tyranny and trust our professionalism to tell us about progress, good teachers have always known this and more importantly they know how to communicate what needs to be done to their pupils. The old cliche that weighing a pig more doesn't result in making it any fatter is as true in education as it ever has been in animal husbandry.

Today's Secret Teacher works at a school in London.

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Secret Teacher: forget the changes to GCSEs – education needs an overhaul

Michael Gove needs to stop the endless tinkering – English education needs a fundamental rethink. Photograph: Alamy

If the constant kvetching over the GCSE reforms has taught us anything this week, it's that there are bigger problems than Mr Gove's latest filibuster.

This is to take nothing away from the latest mini-catastrophe. The GCSE is Gove's latest O-level proposal/political show pony. Nominally watered down and tweaked slightly, but pushed through regardless. Designed to "restore rigour" and other meaningless, but impressive sounding hyperbole. Reducing subjects to a one-day recall test at the end of a two-year course regresses our country's education to the 1980s or earlier. Which has been the intent all along from Mr Gove, so he is to perhaps be lauded for his consistency.

But pragmatically, there's an election in a year or so. It would seem likely that we will see a new secretary of state for education. And the two years or so of students who have been faffed about will hopefully see their courses change back to allow for some form of (stricter) modular assessment. The world will continue to turn, and what will we really have lost?

The answer, sadly, is a lot. Because, I'd like to let you into a secret here, we need to fundamentally change the way we educate students. Not the way Mr Gove has suggested, obviously. Although it has to be said he has provided both the "fun" and the "mental" for the last few years. But no, what we need is an overhaul of approach. A way of making education accessible to the different styles of learners, and students of different abilities that the 21st century has produced.

Change is hard enough to affect in the first place. Our unions, so useful in some ways, are hugely resistant to upheaval of any scale, let alone the major changes we need to make education relevant to preparing the 21st-century pupil for the world. They rightly voice our concerns on workload. And with the ever-shifting sands of qualifications – so far this proposed GCSE is the third or fourth incarnation – teachers are having their time wasted preparing for courses that they know are unlikely to live much past the next two years or so. On top of this there will be the increased demands of data tracking, real-time reporting, and whatever trend Ofsted has chosen for the given year.

And should we moan, we are labelled shirkers. Malingerers who are overpaid and have too much time off. We finish at 3pm every day, apparently, so what right have we to complain about a pay freeze? I long to teach in a country where educators are respected. But then perhaps if we complained less, that might go some way to improving our reputation.

It's a grim picture indeed. So I'm struggling to get too wound up about the latest GCSE change. It's another unwanted, poorly-researched change created for the wrong reasons. But if teaching in the UK has taught me anything, it's how to just get on with the job, and ride out the changes as best as I can. I'll spend summer planning my units of work and departmental policies. I might even go somewhere affordable for a week or so. And then I can return in September, ready to face the real rigour of the British educational system – more of the same old shit.

This week's Secret Teacher works at a secondary school in the south east of England.

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Suli Breaks: The secret of success? Forget exams – it’s all about getting the Breaks

Somehow a twenty-something spoken-word poet from Wood Green in north London named Suli Breaks has bagged millions of hits with exactly that, with his breakthrough monologue “Why I Hate School But Love Education”. Following it up with “I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate” and his EP “The Dorm Room”, he has even drawn attention from the likes of the Washington Post in discussions of childhood rebellion and reforming the way kids learn in class.

His tracks aren’t for everyone – even while remarking upon his success, the Post criticised “factual inaccuracies” and “grammatical errors” in his delivery. Yet they have evidently struck a chord worldwide – as a quick glimpse at the online comments from adults and children alike will attest. Speaking to The Independent, Suli argues that the education system, as it stands, is out of date. “The world has changed with innovations in the internet and social media having made it very open, giving everybody the opportunity to do something,” he says – before adding that he believes the way we’re preparing our children for work and for grown-up life in Britain sadly doesn’t reflect that.

“It’s a predated system but also the structure of it doesn’t allow for fluency of thought, it’s so rigid in its application, everything has to be yes, no, black and white, but I don’t think the world is in that stage at the moment,” he says. “We’re in a period of innovation, a sort of renaissance. People are becoming millionaires by building their own companies on YouTube, people promote their businesses on Twitter, I can speak to someone who’s in Tokyo on Skype without even needing to have their phone number. But you’re not taught any of the opportunity that is right there in front of you.”

Being introduced to social networking in the classroom is not high among Education Secretary Michael Gove’s priorities for schoolchildren. Yet exam boards may find some agreement with Suli on his opposition to grades, contemplating the effect of realising as a pupil that you “were only one mark short of the top grade”. Cambridge Assessment recently argued that candidates can have quite different marks but end up with the same grade – or results just one mark apart but divided by a huge grade boundary.

In fact, listening to his tracks, it is startling how many of his questions are being debated by think tanks and advisory groups. “We all have different abilities, thought processes, experiences and genes – so why is a class full of individuals tested by the same means?” he raps – an argument echoed by Demos, who believe that students should be assessed in subjects they enjoy rather than what the state deems important.

While the messages in his work might sound political, Suli doesn’t see it that way. “To me what I’m saying is common sense, it’s what I see around me. There aren’t any political figures that I can relate to.” The people he admires are Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, David Beckham. “He wasn’t the cleverest guy, he wasn’t even the best footballer, but he has made the most of what he had”.

Breaks himself grew up as one of three children in “a conventional African family, where education is paramount”. He went to Enfield Grammar for a year before accepting a scholarship to play basketball in Middlesbrough. From there he went on to study law at Sheffield.

Despite excelling in academia and being top of the class in his school life, when he left, Suli says, the real learning began: “The whole process of education seemed futile in terms of what I would get from it, what I enjoyed doing and what I saw other people in the world excelling at.”

He argues that if teachers incorporated YouTube or sessions on social media in class, it would help engage children who “have unintentionally shut off to education”. These days he spends a lot of time talking to the kids on his estate who “would rather spend their time doing something that is passive rather than engaging their minds”, trying to convince them that there is a different way of learning. “Everybody has a different path. I have friends who are as smart as anybody but just because they can’t excel in the traditional way then they’ll be looked on as stupid and that has an effect on your whole life.”

This cycle feeds into so many social problems, Breaks points out, like crime and youth unemployment. “A lot of people who I know who have participated in crime are those who in the school system couldn’t find a place for themselves. If a society doesn’t accept you, why would you want to conform to its needs?”

‘I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate’: The lyrics

Test us with tests,

But the finals are never final

Because they never prepare for the biggest test which is survival.

What I suggest is fairly outlandish

I don’t except everyone to understand this

Except the kids that know what it feels like to be

Worth no more than that D or that A

That you get on results day

The ones whose best stories, were never good enough for their English teacher

Because apparently you missed out key literal techniques

Didn’t follow the class? plan

And the language was too informal for him to understand.

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