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.

Where there is a bullying problem the fault more often than not lies with senior management. I have been teaching for 19 years in a variety of schools - special measures, private, deprived council estate, middle class suburbia. All schools will have incidents of bullying. Where there is good senior management bullying isn't tolerated within the ethos of the school.

I was only listening with half an ear too, but thought the gist of it was that the severance procedure should be changed so it takes about a term in future, rather than the year it currently takes. Even in the new system, that a heck of a lot more notice than you find in other professions.

As schools are generally supportive learning environments, I should imagine there's a lot of performance review and opportunity to remedy before it reaches that stage.

The numbers sacked at present are minimal (though there appears to be an unspecified but much larger number of quasi-managed moves and fresh starts going on). Are these changes likely to alter that as the general pattern? After aol schools are staffed and (with very few exceptions) managed by teachers, so they will be in charge of implementation and what any if this looks like in practice.

My DH has taught in a lot of schools over the years and has come across some really shocking teachers. I think a lot of time this is either ignored or the Head/mAnagement team give them a hard time in the hope that they will apply for another school. References count for a lot in teaching and the story goes that often it is the weakest teachers with the best references as the school is hoping to get rid of them

I don't think anyone wants poor teachers to continue teaching.

• Not if they can't improve, I mean.

That's a shame about your friend ASByatt, but that is also pretty standard in most professions.
The point about my MIL is that she was not up to her job as a teacher and should not have been carried by the profession. The bad apples be they incompetant or bullies and at all levels need weeding out and the quicker that happens the quick the profession will regain the publics respect.

I always understood (from a TES article) that you do have a capability process for teachers identified as poorly performing, but that less than half of all LEA's actually dismissed anyone over a 5 year period.

A head I know tells me that incompetent teachers are just encouraged to go to other schools and are given nice flattering references to help them get jobs elsewhere. That kind of stuff doesn't really help the teaching profession (but I can understand why heads do it - must be impossible working in a system where your hands are tied)

Surely this new legislation wouldn't really affect people whose incompetence was due to significant health/mental health needs as that's not really^ about competence in the same way, is it?

What is an incompetent teacher, anyway? How is it defined? I work in schools and I've observed some teachers that I don't think are amazing, but they're not incompetent. I think you have be really, really quite bad to be classed incompetent.

Of course giving head's greater powers MAY be abused. But with great powers come great responsibilities. You cannot have one without the other. The other side of the coin is we have bad teachers noone can sack. That's hardly a great place to be either.

We can't make head's responsible if they cannot sack staff who are not up to the job. Same really applies for the heads. Fair mechanism's should be in place to sack head's who are not up to the job as well.

Also it depends largely on the school where you work. There are many teachers working in middle class suburbs who would not last a day in some inner city schools.

Presumably teachers are assessed by OFSTED as they teach,(and hopefully by their heads more regularly) don't see why that should change. What does it matter whether that's in an "inner city" or "middle class suburb". Teachers have to teach their kids not anyone else's.

Is it really so hard to sack them?

The mediocre secondary school near us got a new head about eight years ago, first thing he did was sack seven senior teachers, it didn't take him a year to do it either. The school is now 'outstanding' with exam results as good or better than the private schools in the area.

Good for him I say.

Working in a middle class suburb is much easier. That's why the teachers don't move on.

I hate Gove and I haven't RTFT

Nor am I a teacher

All I would like to say is that there ARE some shit teachers (as there are some shit every professionals) and I would like to get rid before children lose a whole year.

The end.

Thing is, even in the private sector it is really difficult to sack someone for incompetence. Unless someone does something horrendously wrong then just bad performance/not being up to doesn't tend to get you sacked.

A grand a month at 50! I took er at 55 which was 12 years ago.I had been teaching for 30 yrs my pension now is about 600 a month.

Er was because of a house move and no jobs in new area (not incompetence) and I did some supply for the next 5 years to supplement my pensiom till oap was available.

Everyone in schools know who the bad teachers are...especially the kids.

Indeed there are some teachers who give the profession a bad name. They not only ruin their students' chances but also provide more work and stress for competent teachers who have to go into their lessons and deal with the bad behaviour.

Although it's very unlikely for a teacher to get sacked, most struggling teachers jump before they are pushed. It is a miserable job if it's not for you. That's partly why the drop out rates for new teachers are so high.

I question though how one decides if a teacher is incompetent. Would it be because of some of the examples given upthread - where the teacher is clearly doing their students a total disservice? Or would it also be well liked, experienced, successful teachers who happen not to teach in the way that the Government wants them to that week?

as cornastasiaski says, bullying requires a strong input from senior management., individual teachers can only do so much.

Likewise there are teachers who are bad at teaching or have poor subject knowledge and there are those who are bad at behaviour management.

DD1 forbids me to complain about one of her teachers, because she says she is a good teacher who plans interesting lessons. She says it is not her fault that she has been given a set3 group who don't want to learn anything.

Ideally all teachers would have brilliant social skills and perfect subject knowledge, but that is not the world we live in.

Yes we need to be able to sack very poor disinterested teachers and weak HTs. However, we also need a society in which education is valued. not just by the pupils who will go on to get A*s, but by everyone.

Whatever a child's ability, they should have the right to attend appropriate interesting courses, where disruptive behaviour is not tolerated!

I'm wondering where Gove is going to get these outstanding teachers he wants? I've taught in a school in the south east where they are so desperate for teachers they resort cover supervisors and overseas teachers, some with English as a second language. The overseas teachers were often very good and had a solid career in their country but were ripped to shreds and regularly reduced to tears by the kids in this country because they had a different style or weren't used to the routines used.

Gove was also saying that poorly performing teachers were ones that had poor class control - an accusation that could be levelled at a lot of NQTs - good class control comes with experience and reputation which can take a few years to develop, are we supposed to sack these teachers before they've had a chance to learn their craft?

He focuses on class control the whole time in relation to assessing teaching ability as this plays to popular opinion on 'good' and 'bad' teachers, but fails to recognise the vast range of tasks and responsibilities a teacher has to undertake. There are already disciplinary procedures in place and it is untrue that these are not used when needed, what we don't need is a witch hunt by Gove who IMHO doesn't know what he's talking about.

Where's the additional training resources to help teachers "improve"? Sorry but having done a pgce myself and having an sen kid I understand just how little behavior management or sen knowledge is imparted in standard teacher training.

Also what about poor head teachers? My son's last HT is getting away with ruining kids lives yet is untouchable. She also bullies her staff.

A stick with no carrot is never good policy making. This is just empty rhetoric in terms of actually making real, tangible improvements to educational standards.

Isn't it frustrating that teaching seems to be as much about class control as education? How can we change this? Obviously not just by getting rid of crap teachers, though sometimes that may be a cause of poor behaviour and therefor poor results. Wouldn't it be great if the money was there to employ more teachers so we could have smaller class sizes, disruptive kids taught by specialist teachers in their own groups so other kids didn't suffer, or maybe even teaching as pairs to give teachers more back up and presence in the classroom, and allow for more one to one time. I agree we need a more comprehensive way to tackle the problem that just sacking crap teacher.

The problem is, how to you prove incompetence?

Teaching is not something you do in isolation. A child's education happens in the classroom, in the home and in the world as a whole. If you have a class with disinterested or even hostile parents, full of students with multiple issues, perhaps they have spent time in refugee camps or have escaped violence, maybe many if not all have English as a second language. How do you measure progress in a group like that? Is a teacher with a class composed of students with any or all of the above issues failing if their students don't gain acceptable levels in national tests?

In my 12 year teaching career I never had a class that didn't have any of the issues stated above. I taught in private as well as state education. If your students never do homework because their parents tell them not to listen to what the bitch teacher says, or if your students consistently turn up late for exams because they have to take their younger siblings to school first, or if your students only knowledge in how to survive in groups has been learnt in Somali refugee camps where intimidation of the weaker keeps you alive, how do you measure success? For many of my classes success was maintaining a calm environment. For some of my students, bringing a pen and paper to school consistently was a major triumph. For others learning that women have the right to speak, or how to construct a sentence in understandable English was a life skill. For others it would be an A grade when no one intheir family had ever passed an exam.

However, Gove does not see it that way. He is interested only in concrete measures that take no account of the wider context. If he wants "failing" teachers to be sacked, is he going to sack the Senior management teams that refuse to provide the back up as well? Is he going to sack the treasury who don't fund schools enough to supply the special needs provisions? Is he going to sack the parents who have little or no interest in their children's education and think learning happens only at school? Is he going to sack the parents who take their children out of school because it's cheaper to do it in the term time? Is he going to sack the councils who are too underfunded to provide libraries?

I'll agree with him when we, the electorate, can get rid of crap politicians. He's top of my list.