Headteacher suspended for speaking out

[UmbrellaHat]

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/head-suspended-for-potentially-disparaging-remarks-about-teachers-hits-out/

Her staff refused to work the days required and SHE is the one suspended

Haven’t there been two previous threads about this?

I honestly think the lack of guidelines for schools and the generally crap state school response to the pandemic is going to be one of the biggest scandals that comes out of this crisis.

If any other sector had responded in the same way as the education sector they would go out of business.

Where was the direction from government/ofsted?

Why were there no emergency guidelines brought in for a minimum standard of offer at each key stage?

Why is the government NOW investing £1 billion into 'summer tutors' instead of half that into an internet ready device so that ALL learners could access Zoom and homework?

It's a shit show.

£500M equates to £74.28 per pupil if you want to target all learners. Good luck with getting a decent internet ready device for that.

That is one way of looking at it.

fleurdeliz

To be fair the government did put in place a laptops for pupils that didn't have one.

Which have arrived this week.All our children who were eligible (3) are in school full time so now don't need one!

If my children's head teacher went moaning to the media about their staff to get their 5 minutes of fame I'd be appalled and think them very unprofessional to not deal with it internally. I'd hope they'd step down.

Many of the laptops are unusable. Several have been sent locked. Without MS programmes and schools have been given different numbers of laptops and dongles. Some didn't get anywhere near enough. And some are still waiting. Why on Earth they didn't just give a grant to all schools to go out and get the tech required I'll never know. This should have been in place by the end of the Easter Hols at the latest!

Reading between the lines this is a headteacher that got her school to outstanding almost a decade ago, under a very different Ofsted regime. She has now resigned and is trying to push a narrative that the reason standards have declined since 2011 is because of the staff rather than her leadership. It sounds like the school will be better off without her. As a HT you can’t have it both ways, if you don’t take responsibility when things go badly and blame your staff , you can’t then take credit when it’s all going well. Either the success of a school is all about the teaching staff and the 2011 outstanding was down to he staff who were at the school then and not the headteacher, or the leadership of the head is crucial and she gets credit for the Ofsted but also has to take responsibility for the situation now.

Isn’t the head responsible for directing staff to work? If she couldn’t do that-I would be thinking she was a very poor leader.

Sounds like she just fancies her name being in the papers.

We have not yet had a single laptop. I don’t really see what the point is in laptops that don’t arrive until term is over.

@fleurdeliz

I honestly think the lack of guidelines for schools and the generally crap state school response to the pandemic is going to be one of the biggest scandals that comes out of this crisis.

If any other sector had responded in the same way as the education sector they would go out of business.

Where was the direction from government/ofsted?

Why were there no emergency guidelines brought in for a minimum standard of offer at each key stage?

Why is the government NOW investing £1 billion into 'summer tutors' instead of half that into an internet ready device so that ALL learners could access Zoom and homework?

It's a shit show.

I would not want them to be using zoom. Google and Microsoft offer education suites for free (which include video conferencing) and without the privacy or security concerns. The issue is that schools have been able to do what they like so some schools have been great and others have been terrible. Although I think most parents have a totally distorted idea of how much primary students do in a school day.

Many schools are still waiting for the promised laptops to arrive. And the money promised for catch up turns out to be existing funding not additional. Lots of promises little actual support

This isn’t a thread about laptops though.

This is a thread about a Headteacher being suspended for telling the truth about the laziness of some of the teaching staff she personally knew.

This is a thread about a Headteacher being suspended for telling the truth about the laziness of some of the teaching staff she personally knew.
For some reason thread get hijacked by irrelevant ranting about lack of 'funding' rather than addressing the point.

UmbrellaHat

If we are going "back to the point" the head can tell any rubbish that she likes and everyone else cannot say anything due to the same reason she got suspended.

The actual story is about a head teacher who has been suspended for extremely unprofessional behaviour on a radio show.

She wanted staff in three days a week rather than two, so that they could work on presentations for their appraisal. At this point, central government guidance was that everyone who could wfh should do so.

Her management was poor and criticising her staff on a radio show was extremely unprofessional.

Still, she's off at the end of the academic year, so gets to sit at home doing nothing on full pay.

I don't have a problem with her alleging that some teachers sit at home doing nothing. She has a right to express her opinion. But, true or not, she shouldn't have made negative comments about her own staff on the radio. Criticise them in private by all means but not publicly like this. That could undermine her ability to manage her staff.

She shouldn't have been dishonest but she should have been more circumspect. She should have sidestepped the question about her own school.

Asking her staff to come in to school to do stuff they could have done at home was also poor, potentially putting safety at risk, but that doesn't appear to have been a factor in her suspension.

As a chair of governors I agree with what PRH has said. I would have taken the same action as her chair of governors and suspended her because to say what she said on live radio was simply not appropriate and unprofessional.
We do not know what conversations had been going on before the radio interview but the inference in what has been said by both headteacher and others was that there had been an on-going conversation about getting staff into school for more than the 2 days. If as Chair I had been involved in such a conversation, which I would have expected to be, as soon as it was clear that there was resistance to such a move, then to hear the headteacher make such public comments would have really annoyed me and others involved. It was massively unprofessional and inappropriate, no matter what her own thoughts were on the issue.