'Becoming assistant head meant assuming responsibility for some of the school’s strategic priorities, including ‘achievement’ – quite a big thing to take charge of, I thought.
But I was told the school had signed up for a support network which involved meetings in a grand hall in the centre of London.
Usually teachers meet in a dingy classroom after hours with instant coffee and digestives. Here, there was fancy lighting, professional projection, proper pastries and a top-notch lunch. The meetings had an evangelical zeal with the charismatic leader exhorting us to do everything to make our schools’ results better.
But then something happened which, to me, got to the nub of everything that I believe is wrong with our education system.
One speaker started to describe qualifications that schools could teach pupils very quickly, even in the last few weeks of the academic year, that counted towards a school’s overall statistics.
Another described how she had found the exam board that gave the highest number of top grades. Yet another told of a loophole which meant you could enter pupils for a particular GCSE exam, not teach them anything about it and it would benefit the school’s stats regardless. I felt that a lot of the advice crossed the line from moral duty into gaming the system and massaging the numbers. Entering children for exams you haven’t taught for is immoral, regardless of whether it takes your school up the league table.
Such meetings exist because teachers are under crippling pressure from Ofsted to produce ever-better results. With pressure mounting on all fronts, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I wrote a resignation letter.
I leave teaching burned-out and frustrated. Something is clearly wrong. Two in five teachers quit the profession within five years of qualifying; four out of five report high stress levels because of all the bureaucracy.' Ryan Wilson. Mail.
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