That glass ceiling! Part 2

[var123]

Continuing the discussion about artificial limits placed on G&T children, and the resulting impact on their health and happiness (not to mention futures).

Do they really matter less because they have a perceived "advantage"?!

original thread here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gifted_and_talented/2507232-The-glass-ceiling-for-very-able-children?

We tried a national strike against our incompetent overlords (the government don't value or seek to retain experienced teachers any more than SLT do) a couple of years back, var but people seemed to think we were whinging workshy losers who should put up and shut up. Now we're all quitting.

The government says there's no crisis.

It is possibly something to worth bearing in mind when complaining that a teacher doesn't individually handcraft special advanced lessons for your able kids. We are often snowed under with other stuff.

Either you believe in mixed ability education with hand-crafted differentiated teaching.

Or you believe in selective education with whole class teaching.

Surely?

Er, no, I'm a maths teacher. We have sets. It's not selective education because kids can move up and down between sets without having to change school.
I taught a kid in set 3 of 4 in Y7 who ended up progressing up the ranks and finally doing Further Maths A-level.

My DD is in a class of 9 pupils for history, geography and civics. The teacher differentiates. This throws up all sorts of horrible problems that we have never encountered in undifferentiated classes of up to 29 DC. GOK how hard it must be to differentiate in classes of 30.

Var, I'm astonished every time you share how things are done at the "outstanding" school your sons attend.
How can it be "outstanding"? I had already heard that Ofstead really has nothing to do with how a school really is, but it couldn't be more clear in this case.

Today DS got his homework book from school. The homework from last week is marked as usual. The next page has some notes about what they have been doing in English and Maths this week so that all parents are up to date with what is happening. The explanation for the Maths's homework in this particlar page seems to be the general one that all the other children in the Y2 class get (it is important to practise counting in 2s, 5s, 10s with your child, then progress to 3s and 4s). But the homework sheet DS got is 15 multipplications of 3 digits by 1 using the grid method. I haven't taught him that method at home. I have only heard of that grid method in mumsnet (I learned the columns method when I was at school). I asked DS when did he learn that? He said today his teacher called him for a bit while the others were doing something else and explained him the method.

I see that as differentiation, and his school is not even "outstanding" according to Ofstead!

In every decade for 100 years one thing you can always be sure of is teachers are never happy.

Career progression and pay prospects are very poor relative to many other graduate careers. Managing a state school in no way equates to managing a business - it's pretty thankless. I think teachers have a fairly raw deal. Hence the unhappiness.

However, I wish teachers wouldn't get all creative with the materials. I understand there aren't enough outlets for personal expression and creativity in most school settings but teachers need to work less at creating proprietory materials.

Teachers might have a tendency to moan, but I've never known so many to quit.

My department is going to lose both our NQT and NQT+1 this year. Both leaving teaching because of the workload.

Lurked says the same thing, Ellle.
I am asking myself if I am exaggerating, or cherry picking to weave a tale but I am not. This is what happens. Work rarely gets marked, DS was told that he almost has to loudly declare his nerdiness each and every time he wants extension work, books aren't completed and teachers get stolen away to plug gaps in year 11.

There's good evidence that judgements about teaching quality are very subjective. There was some research published recently that showed (off the top of my head so figures could be wrong) that 75% of lessons judged by an observer to be "outstanding" would receive a lower grade from a second observer. And 90% of those judged inadequate would be upgraded by a second observer.

That's without even starting on the issue of schools gaming the inspection system.

I'm sure neither of my children's schools would be judged outstanding in the UK. However, they are both decent schools which seem to have done all right for my highly gifted eldest and my (probably) borderline gifted youngest. And part of this is because there is a national curriculum which is consistently applied by trained teachers using quality text books (so a student moving from one of the most deprived middle schools in France into a selective programme can remain in the top 2 in all subjects).

Either you believe in mixed ability education with hand-crafted differentiated teaching.

Or you believe in selective education with whole class teaching."

Or comprehensive education with setting?

The gifted children I know would be bored silly by the rigid educational programmes like the French model - in fact, my started out in the French system and it was quite evident that it would definitely not suit him and we moved him into the English one. It is a stifling system which promotes only one notion of "giftedness".

Gifted children are those who are able to think out of the box. They need selective and individually tailored educations - selective to be with a cohort of like-minded children, and individually tailored because even the gifted children are individuals with strengths and weaknesses. They need flexible curricula which allow them to think laterally as well as vertically.

Mominatrix - you are comparing the French overseas state system with London independent schools. It's not exactly comparable! I wouldn't put my DC in the French schools in London for love or money.

And yet the objective evidence is that French schools seem to do rather well for gifted children (they do terribly for the least able, and especially for children with learning difficulties - but that is another debate).

My DD is 14 and has spent her whole education in very ordinary French schools (a very run down Catholic primary and then state secondary schools in deprived post-industrial towns). She will take her Bac at 16/17 (she will turn 17 during the exams), by which time she will be fully trilingual as she's in a bilingual programme where she is taught, in Spanish, by native Spanish speakers for one third of her teaching hours. If she works hard, there is nothing to stop her accessing elite HE institutions if that's what she wants to do.

An individually tailored education would be nice - that's true for all children - but state education systems don't have the resources to provide private tuition for all children (and nor should they, IMO). And I can't think of anything worse than having her segregated in some sort of high IQ club full of competitive kids with pushy parents. Her best friends are rarely drawn from her most academic peers - I don't really subscribe to the whole "EQ" thing, but if I was pushed I would describe her friends as "high EQ" rather than "high IQ".

"Gifted children are those who are able to think out of the box. They need selective and individually tailored educations - selective to be with a cohort of like-minded children, and individually tailored because even the gifted children are individuals with strengths and weaknesses. They need flexible curricula which allow them to think laterally as well as vertically"

Well, when I'm world dictator, that's what every single child will get. (Apart from the selective bit- I really don't get this "I want all my child's friends to be exactly the same as him" idea)

Just to add to that, 10 years ago, when we were first getting to grips with the french education system, most british parents would I think have preferred a UK (state) education for their children. I haven't heard anyone say that for a while now though - the demotivation of the teaching profession in the UK, the loss of experienced (expensive) teachers, the widespread use of supply and unqualified teachers - all those things have made the UK system much less attractive unless you're in the position to go private.

noblegiraffe "Teachers have a tendency to moan."

I don't know about that- maybe every trade and profession have a tendency to moan - but when people vote with their feet in large numbers then you know something is genuinely amiss, especially when they are choosing a career change, not just moving to a new employer (by that I mean a new school).

Strikes aren't the way. They work very well when you are can hold your breath longer than the other side can but the only people who really struggled when the teachers went on strike were the working parents who had to scrabble to arrange childcare. The thing that goes first when teachers strike is the relationship with the parents (not all, I hasten to add!) Those sort of things are hard to mend and make your working life even harder thereafter.

DS's NQT teacher went on strike six weeks into her first job. I mean, how can you justify taking exception to the t&c you signed up to only 6 weeks previously? Not that she tried to explain it, obviously. She knew her rights - she didn't have to tell us she was going on strike until the last minute, and she was never going to try to keep the parents onside by maybe saying that she was sorry about the impact but she felt she had to take action. She lost a lot of parent's respect that week and she never really got it back.

The BMA and junior doctors showed how to do it.

None of this changes the fact though that teachers clearly have something that deeply upsets them. Even though they are much disliked by the teaching unions, don't the free schools, academies and some independents provide individual teachers with a chance to break free from it all? To do the job that you all set out to do without being obliged to write screeds of boring comments and judgements that you may have to triple record, but will never be read. Surely if the admin just disappeared, your job and work-life balance would be greatly enhanced?

bert most DC don't need an individual program.

Most DC sit in (relative) close proximity on the bell curve of ablity.

The NC and GCSE syllabus worked very well for my DD in the subjects where she has no unusual ability. Top set speed plus a bit of judicious skiing off piste was enough for her to learn well, get a good grade and keep interested (mostly).

However in her areas of unusual ability it didn't work so well. So the teacher had to tailor things. Fortunately, this being a private school the teacher had no choice and to be fair, she didn't seem to mind.

BertrandRussell - finding friends "exactly" like your child isn't really what its about, and its nigh on impossible anyway. Finding friends with whom you can share your interests though isn't too much to ask, is it?

I used to live abroad, and I made good friends. However, it was really wearying having to explain everything all the time, and not always getting what they were on about because I come from a culturally different place. I think its a little like that with friends.

DS1 used to get really upset when he was younger when none of his contemporaries understood, or had any interest in what he was talking about. Even if there had been just one other boy a little like him, it would have made an enormous difference.

DS2 is more flexible in nature, and he finds it easy to just dumb down or smarten up depending on who he is with.

Yes, we shouldn't confuse friends with peers.

I love teaching. However, one of the things that I find stressful is the often Alice-in-Wonderlandesque lack of clarity in what is expected of us, coupled with what seems to me to be an ever decreasing respect for teachers from society as a whole.

So at the moment in primary (I can't speak for secondary to the same level of detail):

Curriculum

• We have a new curriculum that in some subjects is extraordinarily lacking in detail (Art runs to 1.5 pages of A4, in large font, for the whole of primary) and in other areas seems to have been put together by a committee with radically different views, resolved only by lumping absolutely everything in.
• No trialling whatever was done on this curriculum. While in some areas there is sensible 'laying down of foundations' before moving on to more advanced material, in others the 'we must raise expectations' mentality means that many children are being taught 'advanced' skills when they have not mastered the basics, to the detriment of both. (That is one of the reasons that textbooks for the new curriculum are proving useless at the moment)
• The time between issuing of the revised curriculum and having to start to teach it was too short for the preparation of anything approaching a complete set of quality curriculum materials or textbooks
• Because of the haste in introducing the curriculum, 2 year groups (Y2 and Y6) remained on the old curriculum because they needed to be tested on it. Gap-filling by Y3 and Y7 teachers has therefore been required.

Assessment

• Levels have been scrapped, with nothing to replace them.
• However, high-stakes inspection (Ofsted) requires evidence of progress (without making clear at any point what that might look like).
• Schools have been told that they have to invent a system that fills that gap. Every school can have a different one. School staff are not necessarily statistics experts. Lots of companies have rushed in to fill the gap, often not successfully.
• As so often in schools, schools are caught between 'what they themselves need to know in order to teach well' (whether x grasped the work today and so will be able to move on tomorrow) and 'what an inspection team might need to see to say that children have made progress'. In the absence of ANY firm guidelines about the latter, many schools have 'erred on the side of caution', and gone for belt and braces, highly detailed, high overhead for teacher tracking systems.

Which brings me neatly to:

Trust

• Politicians do not trust teachers.
• The tone of many inspectors implies that Ofsted does not trust teachers.
• As a result, parents increasingly do not trust teachers.
• Which means that schools are having to increasingly justify themselves all the time to all stakeholders - which is much more onerous when as a teacher you feel that the audience starts from the standpoint of 'we know you're not doing a good job, convince me why you might be'.
• Within the overall group of parents, there are a large number of 'special interest groups' - those who feel that the school isn't doing enough for SEN children, gifted children, middle children, boys, sporty children, musical children - and having to justify what the school is doing to every group, when every group does not trust the teacher or the school, is very time consuming (and soul destroying).

Testing

• KS2 tests are used to rank schools very publicly. The 'headline' results are what are used most often, and these take absolutely no account of cohort, so schools with more challenging intakes are perceived as 'bad' whereas in fact these may well be some of the 'best schools' in terms of progress made by the children.
• With the exception of 1 sample paper per subject, no-one knows what the tests for this year will look like. The requirements for assessing writing have changed umpteen times, and new guidance for this year's tests is still coming out regularly.
• The government itself has no idea what the thresholds for expected levels will be. There has been no trialling or statistical wortk - the basic plan is that everyone will take the tests and 'then they will see'
• The number of tests is proliferating - again this seems to be due to a lack of trust that teachers will actually teach anything unless it is tested.
• In this context, many Y6 teachers, faced with a 'moving target', are throwing absolutely everything at their classes, again based on a worst case scenario.

Responsibility
Bizarrely, given the lack of trust, schools are increasingly being required to 'solve all of society's ills'. Policies have to be continually updated to take account of:

• British values
• Child sexual exploitation
• Female genital mutilation
• Radicalisation and the RESPECT agenda

Schools also have to arrange training etc on all of these, which removes valuable training time from things that would improve teaching.

• On the other had, all teachers feel a huge responsibility for the children in their care in primary. We worry about the child who has not eaten,. the one who looks tired, the one who doesn't want to leave, the one who has a 'long holiday overseas' planned and we're not certain what is planned for that. We worry about those whose parents are ill, whose grandparents have just died, who roam the streets late at night because their parents are still at work or out.

Planning and marking

• These are the backbone of teaching. However, there is a huge disconnect between 'what needs to be done in order for children to make progress' and 'what needs to be SEEN to be done'
• Some SLTs are better than others at the 'seen to be done' bit. However, if you are a head in a school deemed to be 'failing' (possibly because you have a challenging intake and thuis your raw results are low), and you are therefore subject to annual inspections, you do have to be seen to do everything that you can. That burden is passed down to teachers in the form of prescriptive and bureaucratic systems for planning and marking.

I could go on, but this is quite long enough....

teacher that is very interesting. I see the trust bit completely - it has broken down, but I do not know why.

When did politicians start to really involve themselves in education? Does it go back to when they were invited in so that they could reform the three school system (grammar, secondary modern and technical colleges)?
From my distant perspective of disinterested 1980s Scottish teenager, it came across loud and clear, even to me, that the politicians did not trust the teachers in England. Why that was, I don't know. Maybe because the teachers tended to be left leaning and the large number of people who were voting Tory clearly weren't?

By coincidence, I've got a newspaper report on my grandmother's funeral on my desk in front me now. She was a teacher and she died suddenly a long before I was born. When I read the article, its clear that at one time school mistresses and masters were highly respected. Not any more though.

Yes, politicians take cheap shots at you to make themselves look like the public guardians at the expense of your professional reputations. This new one about "every child to have read a book and know their times tables by age 11" is a prime example. They load things onto you that have nothing to do with teaching and now they hope to make you responsible for any child who runs off to Syria.

That story this week about not wearing pyjamas to the school playground is a prime example. I'd be insulted if someone came to my place of work in their pyjamas (unless I was an A&E doctor and it was a medical emergency), so why should you put up with it and all it represents about their low regard for you and the work you are doing for the benefit of their children?

What teachers need to do is get the public onside - not just the parents but everyone. You need to do an old labour to new labour type transformation in every media interaction (IMVHO). And, the NUT needs to figure out what its core values and (hopefully restoring respect for teachers so that you have a stronger bargaining hand) and stage on message about those, not get distracted with involving themselves in a transgender debate or commenting on the Syrian crisis (or whatever else they may have planned).

I think French teachers have a difficult job - and they get very little of the shit that UK teachers get.

UK teachers have an impossible job, tbh. Why don't you (as a nation) trust teachers any more? Most of the time I leave my kids' teachers to get on with their jobs like the professionals they are.

var if you lurk on the TES forums, you'll see that the "impossible demands" are often even more impossible in academies. This is sometimes because they want to push older, more experienced, expensive teachers out in favour of cheap and malleable NQTs, and they impose unmanageable workloads and expectations in order to get rid of people.

teacher - while I have the utmost sympathy with everything you say, it just makes me conclude that a rigorous straightforward curriculum with good textbooks that progress logically solve an awful lot of those problems.

stay on message - and other typos!