‘Wanted – Lively and enthusiastic teacher to join a committed and hard-working Humanities Faculty piloting the new Key Stage 3 literacy strategy. Familiarity with the recently introduced English GCSE syllabus an advantage. This is a “rapidly improving school” (Ofsted Report 1998) which presents a challenge. We are part of a mini-Education Action Zone with two other Secondary and five Primary schools. We are awaiting the result of a bid to the Millennium Commission for improvements to our science laboratory suite. Responsibility for the school is shared between the Borough and Edosh plc. Applications from starting teachers welcomed.’
For the last three consecutive weeks a total of 20,000 job vacancies have appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. Many of them read like the text above. If we break down this advertisement it tells us a lot about the dire state of British education.
Wanted – lively and enthusiastic teacher
There is a massive haemorrhaging of teachers from schools and recruitment cannot keep up the supply of new ones. This is despite a series of measures introduced over the last few months such as £4,000 ‘golden hellos’ in shortage subjects and the hurried recruitment of teachers from overseas. Nevertheless, in what should be a sellers’ market the patronising twaddle of these advertisements persists.
Humanities faculty
The swollen-head tendency is to re-label departments with grander and posher titles. The government has recently claimed that there are now 5,600 more teachers in schools in January than at the same time last year. It does not feel true to hard-pressed class room teachers who find secondary classes growing larger. Some of the extra thousands of teachers have been elevated to new titles like ‘Head of Faculty’ with a bit of extra money and time as an inducement to keep them in the school, but chronic under-staffing is the reality.
The new Key stage 3 literacy strategy
Despite promises to stop, former education minister Blunkett kept on unleashing his army of ‘educationalists’ to cook up new courses, qualifications and schemes. The main purpose of these ‘innovations’ was to establish new tests, streaming and setting so that British children are now the most tested in the world, facing an average of 30 tests by the age of 11.
Rapidly improving school
Ofsted and the labels it puts on the schools it inspects are starting to become unfashionable since Woodhead resigned as chief of the inspectorate. It will take some time, however, before ‘bog-standard’ or ‘excellent’, ‘Beacon’ or ‘Specialist’ replace the code teachers have inherited from Ofsted. An ‘improving’ school is a tough one that has just survived being labelled a failure.
Education Action Zones
These were designed to ‘harness private-sector know-how and innovation in schools in deprived areas and to foster closer links between schools and businesses’. Each zone receives a government grant of up to £750,000, part of which is conditional on raising money from the private sector. Actual cash-injection into needy schools from business has been very low amounting to less than £20,000 per business per zone. In its first seven months the Leicester zone raised only £3,000 and East Brighton nothing at all. This is not promising for a government that states, ‘the era of state-only funding is over…We must remember that no public-service model has delivered high-quality services for every child’.
Millennium bid
Schools have had to learn to adjust to the new spirit of enterprise. Teachers have become expert in working up plans for target projects. In other words, there is little money to be given because it is needed. Instead money must be begged for under the headings of ‘improvement’, ‘value-added’, ‘promoting excellence’ and ‘special need’.
Edosh plc
Contracting-out educational services to private businesses is part of the Labour Party’s attack on local government. It is an ideological offensive against ideas of local democracy and designed to undermine community influence in local schools. By transferring buildings, money and resources to private firms, this Labour government is simply enriching its friends at the expense of the poor.
What a picture of corruption and contempt for the poor these job advertisements paint. But the fight back has begun. Teachers’ unions are starting to talk about decent hours and conditions. Parents are protesting against a system of selective education that leaves no school open to their child. This government needs punishing for what it has done to education, to schools, teachers, parents, children and the community. No vote for Labour education!
Susan Davidson
