Monitoring, Regulation and Accountability (Part 1)

One of the main reasons I had had enough of teaching in Britain 3 years ago, was the constant pressure generated by the government and its heavies (stand-up and take a bow OFSTED) on schools and teachers. This manifested itself in the concept of school self-evaluation, whereby Heads and Governors were obliged to provide evidence that their schools were meeting the required standards and generally being good little robot-puppies. If they could prove that they were a good, obedient little school through the evidence presented in mountains of paper and folders, then the big bad bully OFSTED would leave them relatively unscathed when its regular visit loomed.

The problem was that in order to gather the necessary self-evaluation evidence, particularly in a school like the last one I worked in which had only just scraped through its previous inspection, a spiral of accountability was created; the LEA(through its advisors) put pressure on the Heads who put pressure on their managers who put pressure on the teachers to prove that they were being good little robot-puppies.

What did this mean in practice? Primarily: lots of paperwork, from planning, to an increase in the amount of completed work in a child's exercise book, to assessments and record keeping. And that's without even mentioning the paper needed for plannning for all of these things! Secondly: lots of evidence of good teaching practice: photos of fabulous displays, marking and feedback that provided detailed constructive feedback and future targets, reams of assesment sheets showing progress of children against various value-added measures, annotated and levelled examples of work.....The list goes on and on (and bear in mind that all of this was supposed to be done in addition to teaching), but ultimately the best evidence of good teaching was from lesson observations. And it wasn't just the Head sitting at the back of the class looking over her spectacles as she scrawled away on a clipboard and made judgements about you. Suddenly there were governors, curriculum coordinators (your colleagues) and LEA advisors queueing up to get a glimpse and give you their tuppence worth. And bloody stressful it was too. But you did get a nice piece of paper or five saying what although your lesson was very good, had you ever thought about trying x, y and z. Even when there was nothing but glowing praise, it was hard to take seriously because you knew that you had just produced and starred in a showpiece lesson based upon someone else's criteria of what constitutes a good lesson. It would not have been  your typical lesson, which would have been a lot better no doubt: less well-planned, less well-resourced, less good at ticking all the boxes, but more spontaneous, more likely to develop according to the children's responses rather than following a pre-prepared script, funnier, noisier perhaps, certainly more exciting and unpredictable and lively.

Deep sigh.......it's so bloody obvious how wrong it all is.

When I first started teaching in 1990 life was simple. I was given a topic, through which I had to teach the national curriculum requirements (as outlined in an armful of hefty but pretty, colour-coloured folders- maybe life wasn't quite that simple!). How I did this was up to me, and apart from having to produc a 'topic-web' outlining the activities I planned to do, what I did and how I did it was up to me. I had my own classroom and was pretty much free to do as I pleased in it. And for the vast majority of teachers this worked fine and we taught to the best of our abilities. We didn't need to be constantly checked on because we were motivated by a combination of our professionalism and our consciences: we had a ethical duty to the children and their parents to help them learn and progress.

The downside of this relatively laissez-faire attitude was that inevitably some teachers survived in the profession despite being either incompetent or just downright lazy. Which isn't acceptable of course. But it wasn't until I became a parent myself, and in particular until my children encountered one or two of these teachers, that I started to appreciate more the need for tighter regulation and a more rigorous approach to ensuring good teaching standards. (See part 2)