Except, however quaint it might seem, sex matters to young people and positive role models are depressingly rare.

Blogger @redorgreenpen yesterday tweeted an article about the game “Nervous” where girls are encouraged to let boys trail fingers under their skirts until the girl flinches – thus revealing her “nervous” point. The game is not new. It was known by this name among my own school friends, though as a tomboy I heard more of the boys’ side than the girls, and frankly many of them disliked being pressured into doing it too (after all, the presumption was that they had no “nervous” point – a fairly awful situation also). Hence, this is a human rather than “feminist” issue. What we saw as a game, however, was subtly affirming implicit messages about power, consent, and of “going further” as being equal to “winning”, and there was simply no room for conversation about any unease we felt nor any clear way of getting out of it unless you had the fortune of having boyfriend which meant you were ‘off-the-table’, so to speak. It is only now that I flinch about the message that portrays of girls as property – at the time I doubt I’d have thought anything of it.

Worries about messages like these meant one of the first articles I ever wrote for LKMCo was about the topic of sex education. It was about an in-depth year 11 programme covering a wide range of topics with the skilled help of external professionals long since bonfired in Coalition cuts. Much of what I taught the students were questions new even to me: What exactly is the HPV Vaccine? Why is it needed? Where can you touch on another person’s body without asking? (there is somewhere!) What is the difference between sexual assault and sexual harassment? Can you text your friend a pornographic picture?  Important questions that all too often get ignored.

The biggest concern arising from that programme was the lack of confidence young people had about their ability to take charge of their sexual activities. A girl once asked: “Why are you telling us this? The boys will do what they want to us anyway”. The idea that anyone could ever be unhappy about sex was also never mentioned. If anything we were supposed to talk about sex as if it were perfunctory, inevitable, and that you would neither be happy or nor unhappy about. It was as if it would just happen.

That led me to write at the time:

Do students need to know more than the ‘basic facts’?  After all, what skills does a sexually well-educated person need?  By 15 all students are aware of what sex is, so what else am I trying to teach them?

At the beginning of the 12-weeks I share intentions for the programme.  Firstly, given that students will – at some point – have sex, there are several risks they need to think about so they can plan to avoid them.  Secondly, they need to find a language to talk about sex so that if things go wrong they know where to get support and how to talk about it.  In my mind it is vital that young people understand there are boundaries in sex and that if broken you can find the right sort of help.  In each of the years I taught this programme at least one student has later revealed how they came to be in a situation where they were forced into sex.  Yet many hadn’t realised this was unacceptable, or that they could do anything about it.  

All people should also know where they can access contraception, medical clinics and legal protection – this programme aims to begin that path.  But just knowing things does not equate to being able to do them.  So, we focus on two practical skills.  Firstly, making decisions about and using contraception or abstinence. Secondly, we focus on obtaining and evaluating information – e.g. making a clinic visit or balancing online information.

Even after several years of thinking this through, the answers weren’t complete but we were starting to get it right. Since then, with the refocus of the curriculum, much of this hard work (not just in our school, but many) has been washed away. This is a potentially disasterous step back. If we never teach it, or if all we do is worry about the facts, and never build the skills of confidence, then students will instead continue developing them through games like “Nervous” which only reinforce destructive ideas of passivity or force.

We can do better than that. And we must.

However, one line caused some consternation:

Ignoring Ofsted is not an option, and neither should it be.

Some people got upset at me saying this because they think teachers should ignore Ofsted and focus on the students. That’s fair comment, if you think I’m saying teachers should only think about Ofsted, but that was not my original intention. Actually, the original sentence was longer but because the piece goes in the physical paper I am constrained by a word limit so the line was eventually trimmed which maybe meant I sounded more curt than planned. Before cutting, the full sentence read as:

Ignoring Ofsted is not an option, and neither should it be. When you are a pupil stuck in an awful school you would rather have an imperfect system for externally checking teaching quality than not have one at all.

Having studied at a school on the decline we prayed Ofsted would come and see its real light, and I’m grateful that they did. Floating on without inspection is not good for pupils who need someone to see the mess a place is in and stick up for them. This is particularly true in communities where parents are unaware of what should be offered by the school and who don’t have the skills to advocate for better. That’s why I believe ignoring Ofsted is not an option. But I also believe that the scrutiny of teachers that Ofsted undertake must clear, shared widely in advance and contribute to professionalism rather than anxiety. As yet, there is too much of the latter over the former, and with just a little effort it could be sorted. This is not a terminal case.

[NB: I was very grateful to the people who did point this stuff out to me. The only way those columns will stay fresh is if people help me learn about their responses to them].

What they said:

“As Harry Phibbs wrote yesterday, that isn’t the only inconsistency. While private schools are, in Labour’s eyes, at an unfair advantage, state schools are to be banned from copying their successful policies.

For example, independent schools regularly employ teachers who don’t have official qualifications – indeed, such teachers make up a large proportion of the staff in Britain’s most successful teaching establishments. That is why Gove has granted state schools the freedom to employ them, too.”

First off – who are Britain’s most successful teaching establishments? If you look at the ones mentioned by Gove, you’ll find they are state schools: Mossbourne, Perry Beeches, Elmhurst Primary. Secondly, even if we assume that “most successful” means the private schools who top league tables, there’s not a great deal of evidence (if any?) that says this is down to the quality of their teachers over and above the quality seen in state schools. If anything, the evidence tends to run in the opposite direction.

And yet Twigg denies the evidence. According to his speech, qualifications are the only indicator of good teaching – an assumption which, if true, would mean the nation’s private schools would be basket cases, not the bastions of privilege and elitism which Labour claim.

Twigg never said having a teaching qualification was the only indicator of good teaching; but it is a nationally-recognised minimum standard, and that is important. It is important because it ensures the person has been through all appropriate training, some of which is not just to do with teaching but issues such as health and safety (yawn away, but you’ll regret it when you find yourself in a school trip bus crash) or child protection (no yawning here I hope). Sure, some people drive for twenty years without a licence – and without an accident – but we still expect everyone to pass a test. Let’s not allow less than that for a profession dedicated to our children.

Bravely forging ahead despite the inconvenient obstacles thrown up by reality, he therefore commits that he would ban all state schools from employing teachers who don’t hold formal teaching qualifications – which would mean sacking up to 5000 of those currently changing kids’ lives for the better.

No. He said that schools would not be able to employ teachers who do not get a formal teaching qualification within a reasonable period of time (this is a common journo mistake, see more here). As long as all teachers are given adequate opportunity to get qualified and they are genuinely changing kids’ lives for the better, then no doubt they will pass.

This policy shows the fingerprints of the NUT, the union which loves to say “never”. Where Gove has demolished the dominance of their vested interests by allowing teachers to be employed based on ability rather than paperwork, Twigg seeks to restore protections for NUT approved employees – at the cost of the quality of education on offer to children.

“Teachers to be employed based on ability rather than paperwork” – This is a rum statement. One: teachers teach kids to pass stuff. If the teacher can’t pass QTS, how good can they be at helping other people pass things? Two: If you do have the ability you will pass; if you don’t have the ability, you won’t. And, three: If you’re no good at paperwork you will suck at being a teacher who has to deal with exam entry forms, trip permissions, assessment recording, etc.

That the general public often forget teaching is more multi-faceted profession than pontificating at the front of a classroom is annoying, but understandable. That such ignorance pervades in the words of people wanting to represent a political party is not.

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: you feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more than yourself.

Note that Freud is in that list. Books that lift your heart might not always be the fiction ones. They might not always be the most “classic”, what matters is that they lift you up. It’s so easy to become bogged down in the idea that reading should be for other people – to impress or blend with them – but reading is really about much more than that.

Edmundson also reflects how to be a great learner:

You’ll be the one who pesters his teachers. You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one f***ing thing after another.” You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking. You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers can explain but what they can’t.

And he explains why his father got mad when teenaged-Edmundson said he would likely study law for his degree because  lawyers “make pretty good money, right?”:

My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times.

There is so much more wisdom in this piece, but I’ll leave it for you to explore and figure out which are the bits that speak back to you the things you’ve always thought but have never been able to say.

1. TeachFirsters only have six weeks of training. Categorically not true. Yes, participants do a six-week Summer Institute before starting in their classrooms. Think of it as a really really intensive way of doing those first PGCE bits (nb: it’s residential, 6 weeks, twelve hour days). And don’t worry, the tutors at the Institute are HE tutors – many of whom have worked for years with PGCE and GTPs, or still do alongside their TF work. Even so, this is not all of the training. For the whole first year participants also have two HE tutors – a professional and a subject one – who observe them regularly. They have an in-school mentor and a TeachFirst Learning Development Officer. They do similar essays to PGCE students (theory, development, SEN, etc). They complete their QTS folder (like everyone else), and they attend half-termly day-release subject training sessions. Beyond that there are optional activities: conference, evening workshops, and there is the online community where you can gain help or discuss issues. Oh, and there’s the journal – with weekly reflections. All this, plus having their own classes that regularly monitored and observed in-school. Hence, to suggest that TeachFirsters “only have six weeks training” is not only wrong, but when you have been through the programme it actually feels quite insulting.

2. TeachFirst only takes the “brightest” students, but being bright doesn’t mean you can teach. Of all  the myths, this drives me most daft. If accurate, it would read: “TeachFirst doesn’t even take the “brightest” students”. Academically you do need to be decent: a 2:1 or above (from any university). But on its own, that’s not enough. There are also 8 competencies that are tested over the full-day assessment centre all participants go through. A process which has been monitored and continually improved by one of the most professional graduate recruitment teams imaginable. If during assessment participants don’t meet a high score on each criteria, they can’t go on the programme. Every year of its existence (at least until 2011) TeachFirst recruited under-quota because it would rather have fewer trainees than take someone who doesn’t meet standards on the day. Why? Because doing training while also teaching a full NQT load is really very challenging, so they want people to demonstrate the abilities needed to do it well. The entry requirements are not there to say that someone with a 2:2 can’t teach or wouldn’t be an excellent teacher who is even better than a TeachFirster. But when there is so much for a trainee to do on the programme, it’s reasonable to ask for the ability to achieve well in a structured environment (as demonstrated by a 2:1) and then check this alongside all the other skills needed – resilience, leadership, etc.

3. TeachFirsters all leave after two years. On average 60% of participants stay in teaching for a third year. By 5 years that number dips to approximately 40%. Given that teachers through any route who teach in challenging schools have higher turnover rates this number is only to be expected. It’s also true that younger teachers have higher turnover rates, and TFs are predominantly (though by no means all) under 35. Given that general teacher turnover over five years is around the 50% mark you can see that 40% is really not so problematic. It’s also worth pointing out that an estimated 20% of participants also stay in education in other ways – e.g. my studying for a PhD in education, or going into HE to become teacher trainers.

4. TeachFirsters are unqualified teachers. No, TeachFirsters in their first year are trainee teachers. While unqualified in the technical sense, they are unqualified teachers on a programme to achieve QTS.  This is distinct from people teaching without qualification and not taking part in any training (so are ‘unqualified teachers’ in the classic sense).  In the second year TeachFirsters are newly qualified teachers. This confusion arises because schools, at a minimum, paid TeachFirsters at level 2 on the “unqualified teacher” pay scale in the first year.

5. TeachFirst is just a new name for FastTrack Teaching. Nope again. TeachFirst is a route for training new teachers. Fasttrack was a programme to help new teachers improve quickly and go on to become future lead practitioners. They are really quite different.

6. There’s a “secret handshake” that TeachFirsters all know. Maybe I’ll leave this unanswered just to keep a little mystery…..

One final point: Hopefully this covers a lot of what people are confused about, but I can also imagine some people are now chomping at the bit. However, before you write in the comments that “I knew a TeachFirst and they were awful/boring/arrogant/brilliant/genius” do remember that this is likely true for every training route. Furthermore,TeachFirst isn’t bullet proof. An occasional participant makes it through on interview and falls apart at school for a whole heap of reasons. Whether that should be allowed to happen is one of the things we can debate but, please, let’s do it on the basis of what the programme actually is rather than on hearsay or the random TF duffer who once taught in a classroom next to you.

Okay, real final point: I’ve worked less with TF participants since 2011 so if something has changed for the latest cohort rendering something above unintelligible do let me know so I can change it.

A bigger issue is that teachers often talk  down the job, especially to their own children. “Better become a shopkeer, actor…. Pondcleaner!” they say. Being a teacher is also not sexy sounding. What normal person wants to spend year after year saying the same words to different faces? Who wants to deal with the raging hormones of teenagers and the daft mistakes they consequently make? (Those remarks, ironically, are what I said when I helped TeachFirst’s first recruitment team find a university room for running recruitment sessions in 2003. I helped, of course, but I thought they were deluded).

What later changed my mind was that TeachFirst made rethink about teaching as a profession. I know this isn’t what TF is known for, and no doubt several commenters will spend time below the line focusing on all its negatives, but TF does do high quality and continuous learning  for its teacher participants very very well. So well that it made me see teaching as something to be incredibly proud of, no matter who tried to put me off doing it.  Sure, some of this in the hype  - the adverts, the schmaltzy videos, the “mission statement”. But the best thing about TeachFirst is the continual professional development you receive. These are the parts many of its critics don’t see: the school competition where participants compete for funds to run extracurricular activities, summer internships spent creating curricula for charities or working with policymakers, the chance to mentor new participants when you return to summer institute, participants being coached towards goals they set for in their second year, plus endless access to workshops, training days, and an active online community. And this isn’t just over the two years of the programme. It continues after that. By my third year of teaching I was training new participants at Summer Institute and evening workshops, and I could attend annual conferences, dinners, residentials where some of the top thinkers in education were speaking (some free, some very reasonably priced and always at times that fit around schools). These experiences meant I learned about teaching beyond my own context, and I worked with participants in many schools, all of which helped make sense of the increasing levels of responsibility I was facing.

For me, these activities helped me learn about teaching and helped me do a better job. That was why I took part. But they also meant when talking to other people about my job it sounded, frankly, cooler.  Friends in “top jobs” drew parallels with their own work and commented that teaching involved more than they expected. Teachers didn’t “just” teach, they were also involved in a “profession” that develops, and teaches each other, and influences policy. Other groups are seen this way – doctors, nurses, police commanders – and it’s quite proper that teaching be considered the same way.

Still, it has never felt right to me that teachers coming through other routes didn’t get these same opportunities. Both local authorities I worked in provided some similar opportunities  but not anything on par with TF. Academy chains and Teaching Schools might also lead such provision, but it can’t be ensured. And while TeachFirst does a lot it is only a small organisation that trains a tiny percentage of new trainees, it can’t do it all or alone. To raise the status of teaching as a profession there must be opportunities for every teacher to enact and develop their professionalism. This is why I support the revamp of the Royal College of Teaching, and why I support the idea of teacher licencing (as long as it is linked to developmental activities beyond one’s own school).

Not only would more access to continued teacher learning improve our own practice, it also enables people in other fields to see that ‘teaching’ is a complex, growing, engaging, innovative field.   Or, at least, that it involves a lot more than just saying the same words to different faces year-in and year-out.

For secondaries they said Gove had visited 22 local authority schools and 24 academies or free schools. But it was not clear if some of the local schools were in the process of converting. The requester therefore wrote back asking for details of any local authority controlled schools that had changed, and for the dates of changes compared to the visits.

The department wrote back with a list of the local authority schools and their current statuses or changes (& dates)  – hurray! Only the file was unreadable. Thankfully! @CraigArgh emailed after I cried for help on Twitter. Using his computer wizadry he managed to get some of the information (apologies for occasional odd characters). And here it is:

****

Official Visits 1 May 2010 to 31 Oct 2012 Secretary of State for Education Secondary Maintained by foi_monkey

Having listened to @oldandrewuk‘s extensive evidence about Ofsted I am happy to accept that   Ofsted has a problem with teacher talk. However, I also have a story that has always heartened me in the face of people arguing that Ofsted don’t know good teacher-led learning when they see it.

During a recent inspection (last 2 years) an Assistant Head walked into the office ashen-faced. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.  ”Darla spoke for the whole thing,” he said. “The whole 20 minutes we were in there she..just…spoke! She was showing the students powerpoint slides, and then getting them to draw, then getting them to watch, then draw.”

Darla is an art teacher known for doing what she wants but always putting the students first. Nevertheless, we panicked. Though we knew, regardless of all her teacher talk, that the students would be learning a tonne – they always did – would the Inspector agree?

Darla got a clear Grade 1 “Outstanding” for the lesson. The feedback mentioned that every student was engaged, learning, developing. She was commended on her ability to use her voice, language and presence to command the whole-class. And though subtle, she had left planned prompts on students’ desk so no-one was “left behind”.

Ofsted inspectors will sometimes get things wrong. They might have pet hates, or wish to see more activities not coming directly from the centre. But my fears have been at least a little quelled that if they see really good teacher-led learning, then they won’t automatically dismiss it. After all, the same person who inspected our school must go to others too. A black sheep in the crowd? Possibly. But at least we know they exist.

New teachers quickly learn that demanding behaviour from students that you’re not willing to demonstrate yourself is entirely pointless.  Calmness, courage, patience, thoughtfulness – you want them? Model them. Over, and over, and over.*

Gove is often a pro at behaving courteously. He compliments question askers in Parliament, charms speech audiences with anecdotes, knows his brief in Committee sessions. But when it comes to hiding what comes across as a deep dislike of most teachers, he struggles. Reminiscent of a teacher who speaks sweetly to the top set but turns nasty when facing slow, lumbering set six, it sometimes comes across as if he believes that lowering himself to the level of understanding an ordinary teacher somehow means they’ll infect him.

Such irrational arrogances stop otherwise outstanding teachers from being any use at all with lower sets. And, if not careful, acting in this way will stop Gove making lasting changes - even ones that are important and useful.

Last November Nansi Ellis wrote an excellent piece pointing out the problem of Gove asking for teachers to behave in certain ways:

Gove’s call for openness is all one way: teachers must be open to the government’s ideas. A government that really believed in openness wouldn’t start a consultation on the biggest exam shake up for decades by asking whether it’s given the new exam the right name.

One can highlight countless other areas where openness hasn’t happened – the EBacc, disapplication of the curriculum, academy takeovers, the push to SchoolsDirect over PGCEs, AS Level reforms.

It is of course unreasonable to expect any Secretary of State to beat his drum solely to the rhythm of professionals. He works for the public, not the profession. But Ellis suggests a middle way:

True openness requires the humility to realise that you might be wrong, an ability to listen to people with different ideas, and an acceptance that people with different views might also want what’s best for children and young people.

The U-turn on GCSE reforms was one example of this. But it’s not enough. If Gove, like any educator,  wants calmness, courage, patience and thoughtfulness, then he – like the rest of us – needs to model it over, and over, and over again, until he gets the behaviour he wants and need.

* NB: I don’t think you just need to be calm, patient and thoughtful to get students to behave. Would it were that easy! You also need things like clearly and firmly enforced rules (see here or here for more on that). But as a teacher you need to be clear and firm, while also modelling the behaviours you want. As annoying and difficult as that is, it really is the only way.

The story of Arianne on the sixth day made me particularly nervous. With a penchant for incredibly aggressive behaviour, redorgreenpen laments Arianne being label as having ‘Behavioural, Social and Emotional’ difficulties (aka, BESD). Too often the BESD status becomes an excuse for not requiring her to behave better in classes, but this just makes things worse:

I believe that the vast, vast majority of the population is capable of exercising control over their behaviour. But if that basic standard really is not possible for Arianne, by god, she should have gone to specialist provision years ago. If we’re going to decide a child is incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions and behaving properly, someone else needs to step in and take that responsibility for them. That takes money, resources and time. There’s no denying that. But at the moment these uncontrollable children are operating in a responsibility vacuum, insulated by layers of obfuscation and excuses

Arianne does need help, and schools can very rarely access it. Having worked closely with BESD departments I know how the sort of complex inter-service help Arianne needs is often only available once a student has officially been tagged as ‘BESD’. And even then it is slow going. There is often no end to the difficulties of convening professionals, getting parents onside, legal implications, court appearances, continually writing and writing referral documents that get ignored, or lost, or need restarting. Then, on top of that, the complexities of the child’s mental state – the extent of runaway, drug, self-harm, sexual, suicidal behaviours – all of which needed to be factored into decisions taken by the school can make exclusions or managed moves an achingly long process. All the while teachers are being told “stick with her”.

But then came the seventh day – Fawsia. Another traumatised student, this time with an equally difficult backstory yet unwilling to misbehave. Her lack of aggression means her needs are constantly overlooked. Redorgreenpen explains:

The allocation of resources to students in schools is basically based on how loud you shout, how badly behaved you are, how many problems you cause. I’m sure Fawsia could do with some counselling: she’d probably actually turn up to the sessions unlike a lot of the kids who do get that privilege. But Fawsia stays in the background, hidden.

And then comes the nub:

Every time someone advocates including all the Ariannes in your classroom, think of Fawsia, sitting in the corner, having another hour of her education wasted.

The @redorgreenpen Problem

On what grounds do we value one student’s outcomes over another?  

When you only have one teacher in a class whose job it is to deal with the Ariannes and Fawsias (as well as twenty-eight other students) how do you do it? In this case it’s about behaviour – should Arianne’s aggressive behaviour suck in more resource than Fawsia’s desperate silence? Or, in the case of intelligence, should a precociously smart Tyrone ever be in the same class as a plodding Caitlin?

The most obvious answer is that we don’t pick one over the other. We give schools more resources. Proper mental health professionals working full-time inside schools. Proper referral systems where Arianne and Fawsia both get the support they need, without endless rationing which means only the loudest and most extreme cases get it. Proper learning diagnostics, proper follow-up, proper evaluation. But proper resources are ever-unlikely.

And so it is that most day teachers simply must answer the ‘redorgreenpen problem’ over and over again. On what grounds do we value one student’s outcomes over another? How do we pick who to prioritise?