Did I just hear this right? Is Michael Gove blaming bullying on teachers and sayng the answer is to be able to sack them more easily?

[OhBuggerandArse]

On Today just now.

Oh how I loathe him.

Oh oh oh and no such desperate, wicked lies about the referendum - completely unchallenged. Oh dear.

He would blame the worldwide economic downturn on teachers if he could. I really dislike him.

Yep. He is on another planet. A surreal, sadistic one.

He should have been picked up on it by the interviewer though, and he was really given a very easy time.

I know of two cases where DDs teachers tried to tackle bullying and it was the bullies parents who would not face up to their responsibilities.

He was responding to the slightly odd suggestion that making it easier to get rid of failing teachers would be a 'bullies' charter'. He was pointing out - and he is quite right - that if there is a discipline problem in a school, it is often because the teaching staff have lost control. In the school local to me blighted by discipline problems, things only started to get better once the headteacher was replaced. However, because it took so long to do that, the school suffered for several years.

So a question to those who disagree with this.

If a teacher isn't up to scratch, do you think that sacking them is bullying?

For me, as long as the teacher has been given a reasonable chance and plenty of support to improve then sacking them has to be the final step. Some people simply are not cut out to be a teacher. Me for example. I don't have the time/patience it would take. Doesn't matter how much "training" I was given, I simply don't have the temprement.

In which case, should I be allowed to soldier on and give our kids a rather crap education or would you rather see me sacked and replaced with a teacher who can teach?

Remember, that crap teacher could well be teaching your child for an entire year, two if it were GCSE.

I only had half an ear on this (that's half an ear more than I usually give him) but I assumed that bullying in this context meant bullying by school management to individual teachers.

this is absolutely not unheard of. And heads are not infallible/don't have fantastic judgement all the time. Gove's language on BBC breakfast- re teachers skiving off sick- was horrendous. He seems to have a default position of loathing and distrust for teachers in general. Odious.

oh, and I'm not a teacher, btw

You ought to be able to get rid of crap teachers. But how do you get rid of crap headteachers? That's the issue nobody seems to be tackling, and once you have all these shiny new academies no longer accountable to the LA, it will be even harder to get rid of a poor headteacher. I know good teachers who have been badly bullied by senior management, and I fear that in giving more power to headteachers to sack, Gove is treading down a very dangerous path.

My MIL was a teacher who just did not have mental strength to cope with teaching the teenagers she was given to teach with no effective tools to disicipline them. She went off sick for 5 years on full pay and was retired at 50 on a decent pension, a grand a month. She is now 70. So for 25 years the tax payer has been providing for somebody who was basically not up to the job.
Can you imagine any other profession where that would happen. Hopefully not.

Heswall - obviously things must have changed since your MIL went off on the sick, as now there is no way that a teacher would get full pay for 5 years!

"Can you imagine any other profession where that would happen" - yes. Medicine. Recently there was a news item about the doctor who misdiagnosed Ruth Picardie's breast cancer - she was allowed to continue practising and went on to make other misdiagnoses. Apparently she was regarded as barely competent by many of her colleagues but carried on for years until struck off by the GMC.

5 years on full pay? With due respect, I think you may have heard that wrong. I don't know of a single profession where that would happen, unless things have changed drastically in the civil service in the last 25 years.

I have to disagree with you all- I know all too well from relations who are teachers and experience with own DD that it is VERY difficult to sack bad staff, especially in the teaching profession.

My poor DD started A-level maths with a new teacher that year. She wasn't a massively gifted student, she had gotten her A by sheer hard work (maths comes naturally to some people) but she was desperate to do it. Throughout She would always come home with complaints that she was a little bit odd, even insinuating that she had psychological problems from her mannerisms and odd outbursts- I brushed this off, especially as her marked papers were all A grades.

Met her teacher myself and got oddball vibes, but she told me myself that my daughter was a gifted student and was definitely on track for an A*. DD was pleased at this revelation and started to warm to her, but we had another huge problem when one of the boys in her class came in one day and told the teacher that her marking was way off. He was a very clever boy and had gone home and worked with a revision guide, and they had been taught completely differently to how they were supposed to- resulting in wrong answers. At the moment, I thought this was an exaggeration- and when the teacher started crying, they thought she was just having a bad time at home or something and marked badly because of this. Oh they were all so wrong :(

Exam results came back. DD failed and got a U. A lot of the class failed actually. I went in and complained with all these stories but the teachers seemed to think I was just defending my bad at maths daughter. A lot of other parents complained too, and went in with their kids textbooks (some of those even good at maths explaining why half the stuff was marked wrongly) Teachers felt sorry for us but said they couldn't do anything as this wasn't adequate proof.

This was january exam time so my daughter quickly moved to another course, but those who continued would go on to get awful grades in january. Only when my daughter got her A2 results this year would I find out what happened from DD's language teacher who didn't really mind to tell me as she was leaving anyway.

This teacher had bi-polar disorder, a very bad case of it. She said it was found that she was teaching kids the wrong formulas, wrong settings on the calculator, marking them too highly and predicting them too highly. The staff couldn't sack her as that was her only offence- as well as her illness causing trouble, so they asked her to leave quietly in the new year. And along with her went all of the evidence of shoddy marking.

:( so glad DD didn't continue it, could have really messed up her university application.

he's just trying to soften us up for the destruction of LEAs. Then academies and free schools becoming the only two options available to parents, both of which offer minimal job security to teachers and further de-professionalise one of society's most valuable roles.

I know good teachers who have been badly bullied by senior management, and I fear that in giving more power to headteachers to sack, Gove is treading down a very dangerous path.

^^ wot she said

I can't decide (not so much over this new stuff today, but the whole academies/free school malarkey) whether Gove is deliberately trying to destroy education, or whether he just doesn't realise what is it is that he is doing?

As a teacher with experience in 5 different schools, 2 of them failing schools 2 outstanding I have met a handful of incompetent teachers. A number of average teachers and many good to outstanding teachers. Seriously most teachers are hard working and hugely commuted. So yes there should be better systems at dealing with teachers who are not teaching well even after intervention and support. However, I do not understand how Gove plans to staff schools when retention of good teachers is terrible,
many unqualified teachers or cover supervisors teach, many schools use non specialist teachers to teach even core subjects (due to budget cuts ) . It simply is not consistent thinking. I myself worry how on earth I am meant to be good or outstanding every day until I am 67, I can imagine many many teachers will be pensioner off when they are 60+ . The example above regarding the A level class is very worrying, how did this teacher even qualify ? Were they a specialist ? Constant mixed messages and attacks from Gove are goog to nothing for morale amongst the profession.

apologies for typos. Phone

I haven't heard anything wrong, 5 years sickness, neverous breakdown basically on full pay.
The pension beggars belief too on the basis that after A'Levels and teacher training college she would have been 23, so worked 7 years, had DH at 30, back to work part time when he started school at 5. So 17 years of part and full time work in total and so far 25 years of being supported by the tax payer.
And you should hear her comments about single mothers I can barely keep a straight face.

Teachers being bullied by senior management have the same laws as anyone else to protect them.

Doctors protecting each other is a whole other can of worms that needs tackling IMO.

He didn't blame bullying on teachers! You've heard it wrong.

He is proposing making it 'easier' to sack incompetent teachers, cutting the consultation period considerably. I think it is a very reasonable idea.

OK Heswall well rest assured that your MIL's situation would not be replicated now.
My colleague that died of leukemia got 6 months full pay during her treatment time

Yes but how do know they are bad teachers? By looking at the results for the students?
So if your class has less 40% of student with at least a B then you are a bad teacher?
Or you look if they have improved?
So 80% of student should have progressed by x amount during the year.

I think that saying 'here is the course work of my dd/ds and it is obvioulsy wrong' should not be dismissed as 'not enough proof' but after that, what sort of system do you use?

I do know that some teachers are bad, some are average and some are fantastic.
I have seen the difference a bad teacher makes on my own dcs, even when they are 'gifted'. but I am still struggling to see what sort of 'proof' you can use.

I remember as a teenager, we had a teacher that we, as a class, drove to depression. He was off for 6 months before been able to come back to work. But I know for a fact he wasn't a bad teacher as such. He wasn't a good one for us, we made his life hell and we weren't even part of so called 'difficult' teenagers group

I thought Gove handled himself really well on BBC Breakfast and I think he's on the right track. In any private sector job if you displayed incompetence you would be subject to some sort of appraisal and helped to be better in your role, and ultimately sacked if you weren't able to do your job. What the hell is wrong with that idea? It's surely even more important in something like teaching ( or medicine ) where the stakes are so much higher. Don't see what the fuss is about.

grafit he did blame bullying on teachers, presumably to soften the audience up by flagging up something that everyone would agree is bad and needs to be dealt with.

The fact the two things aren't really hugely relevant to each other, and that if he seriously wanted to talk about addressing bullying he would have been talking about powers and support for teachers, partnership with parents and other relevant people and a consistently devised and applied policy, rather than simply ascribing all bullying to poor classroom management, went unnoticed because yes, everybody does agree that something needs to be done about bullying. But really thoroughly examining its causes and what might genuinely work to alleviate it would be complex and expensive, and not soundbitey enough.

And of course bad teachers shouldn't stay in post indefinitely. But if you want good and engaged and committed teachers, you need to start by respecting and valuing them as professionals, not by using them as cheap scapegoats.