Recently a secondary teacher got in touch with me asking if I'd consider sharing something he had written about something that was going on in his school. The following blog post is what I received. It details some worrying practices which appear to be impacting heavily on both student and teacher wellbeing. I echo the author's summary here: there surely is another way. Is this common practice? Are schools tackling the same issues in better ways? I'd love to hear your own experiences of this.
Year 11 students, their teachers and their parents are at breaking point. The most frustrating thing is that we’ve seen this coming for years, and we’ve done nothing about it.
It’s Saturday afternoon. In our house, the major concerns are who will win the race to the bath to warm up after my son’s football match and whether we should prepare the roast to eat before The Voice or during it. I’m wondering whether I can face the pile of odd socks which are glaring at me from the sofa. This is about as stressful as Saturdays get here.
As I write, year 11 are at school. They had English all morning then moved onto Maths. They’re in every Saturday between now and June. The rest of the school finished at 3.25 each day, but Year 11 have an extra hour at the end of each day. Subjects battle for prime positions – Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Science drew the short straw with Fridays – but the students all come, even if it does mean being rounded up and herded from their previous lesson by a pastoral team with apparent infinite patience, who must be clocking at least 30k steps a day as they prowl corridors to check on non-regular coats and chewing gum.
Last year, a respected group of educators put forward the suggestion that core PE should be pulled for Year 11, to give them more time to focus on core subjects. Thousands of schools have gone with this idea, it would seem. So, instead of running around on a field, students are filtered into English, Maths or English AND Maths depending on which week it is where the moon is in its current cycle. Trying to ensure the right students are in the right places depending on the latest half-termly data available is a feat requiring the skills of an aeronautic engineer.
After the mock results came in, the school went into panic. I can’t remember, in my ten year career, this ever not happening. ‘MORE!’ ‘We need MORE!’ MORE resources, MORE time, MORE Walking Talking mocks!’ say the heads of the core subjects. If we don’t, they’ll all fail! The school will be plunged into Special Measures if we don’t throw every spare moment, every resource, every initiative at Year 11.
So, at the end of December, tutor time for Year 11 was replaced by TTI. That’s tutor time intervention to the rest of you. Instead of spending their morning with the form tutor and fellow tutees most of them have known since Year 11, they go to Maths and Science. Instead of having a chance to read a book, finish off a bit of homework or catch up on the news, they are having extra lessons for half an hour each morning. Instead of sharing a joke or having someone who knows them really well checking in on the latest family challenge or holiday plan, their daily dose of English, Maths or Science rises in some cases to over three hours a day.
It’s a Catch 22. All schools are doing it – or at least, that’s the perception. Whatever the rating of your school, you are under pressure to be keeping up. Perish the thought that you might lose your ‘Outstanding’ rating, drop back into RI when you were only recently deemed ‘Good’ or indeed face your entire SLT replaced by a SWAT team of Future Leaders if your school finds itself once again below par. Should you dare to suggest that Year 11 might have one whole holiday without a single day in school, you might slip behind the rest.
I’m not lucky enough to teach a ‘core’ subject. I’m part of the ‘non-core’ as a historian. But I’m better off than the third tier subjects – the arts. My poor colleagues in Drama! Their new written exams are terrifying. It’s no longer a subject for students to demonstrate their creative strengths. They have to be able to analyse stage directions at length – in writing. There was a great opportunity recently to take our students to the battlefields of Northern France recently. It would have been a long weekend – they’d have missed three lessons in total. One of these would have been Science. I may as well have asked for a year off to perfect my crochet skills. Snowball chance in hell. We didn’t go.
We ‘non-core’ subjects have to fight for time with our students. ‘It’s too late!’ we are told when requesting a half day over half term. Maths, English and Science booked theirs in weeks ago! As if we are somehow being granted a huge favour by being allowed to come and work with students during the holiday we too so desperately need.
Now, there are two schools of thought on this, based on the teachers I’ve talked to. Yes, they may be doing 7 lessons a day, but that’s ALL they’re doing, say some – and we can all picture the student who can never take their coat off or get out their pen without being asked about 500 times. The one who could do with a direct intravenous shot of the sense of urgency that the rest of us are feeling. The boys who regress to the age of 5 – happens at this time of year like clockwork. The ones whose parents learn they’ve been communicating using a series of animal noises throughout the school day. The ones who will do ANYTHING to pretend it’s just not happening.
But there’s also this: I don’t go more than a couple of days these days without finding a hitherto quiet and studious student – the kinds whose name you probably wouldn’t know unless you teach them yourself - crying in a corridor. I sit them down, offer them chocolate (it usually does the trick – at least for a few minutes) and ask what’s wrong. ‘I don’t know!’ is almost always the answer. They are overwhelmed, exhausted and their struggles at home funnily enough haven’t diminished to cater for the extra demands of being in Year 11.
And then there are the students who actually love History, have always worked extremely hard, but who literally are unable to find a couple of hours at home to study, because they’re so wrung out from being stuffed like Christmas turkeys with equations, formulae and quotes from Twelfth Night.
Oh, and the teachers. Yes, them. A colleague of mine with two children under 6 at home is on her fourth Saturday at work. We all know she’s dedicated, but she seems to believe that her dedication will come into question if she doesn’t ‘step up’.
I overheard a parent of a Year 11 student telling a mutual friend that she’d like to ‘crawl into a corner and hide’ until it’s all over. The level of hysteria, the level of panic, is quite simply untenable. Only in ten years, I’ve not seen an alternative. At the moment, we are destined to send out into the workforce a generation of highly-strung individuals who have learned through experience that someone else, rather than sending them off to work independently, will always give up weekends and holidays for them, photocopy a rainforest’s worth of resources and put a pen in their hand if they can’t be bothered to root around in their bag. We bang on about building resilience and independence, but our actions – our constant supply of MORE makes these aims laughable.
Vic Goddard said recently, ‘there is always another way’. We need to find it. Now. Because all we’re doing is pouring oil onto the wreckage of the profession we love.
