Quote from Head of Ofsted

[mumblesmum]

' If anyone says to you that staff morale is at an all-time low, you know you are doing something right. '
Sir Michael Wilshaw

From the Guardian 24.1.12

Discuss

and

You are kidding me - what a Knob!

Knobber.

The article is here.

And yes, Ofsted is being politicised. And they were very wrong to drop Contextual Value Added - it's not about making excuses, it's about acknowledging the additional effort schools have to make when their intake is not all children with English as a first language who have well-educated, interested parents.

And a successful school is a team - where the staff understand what the Leadership Team and the Head and the Governing Body are working towards, where there are clear aims and values which the whole school community understand and agree with. Of course you need morale to be high.

(mumblesmum - for future reference, the phrase "Discuss" is widely disliked. We're not writing A Level essays here - and the imperative is always going to sound slightly rude.)

'If anyone says to you that staff morale is at an all-time low, you know you are doing something right. '

I actually can't believe he said that. It goes against all recognised management or leadership theory. And this is supposed to inspire our teachers to produce higher standards?

Hassled, really; to 'Discuss', it is a fairly common and jokey conversation starter when raising something possibly contentious where I come from. Is it really widely disliked and considered rude, gosh, not by anyone I know, must remember not to use when not with friends!

Oh and yes, he's a total prick, but no surprise there then.

Ummm.... no offence meant

Anyway, sent Michael's directive to the HT and DHT so that they can tweak the School Development plan accordingly.

And how can schools run effectively with teachers doing zn outstanding job when morale is lOw

Someone commenting in the CiF part of the article worked in Wilshaw's school and sees this as a pose, and not like the atmosphere of the school where he was HT.

On the other hand, this chimes in nicely with the generally combative stance against teachers which we have come to know and love. Now that there will be no Satisfactory rating, only "Needs to improve", I anticipate a general lowering of morale.

One way of looking at this, and anything OFSTED do and say is to ask yourself, is this the way teachers should be behaving towards their students, OFSTED being the arbiter of standards.

:o

Oh, I forgot to say, Wilshaw is a cock.

I saw this and also felt astounded. What a horrible man he must have been to work for. Personally if I was in a school with low morale I'd be asking what the head was doing wrong. And I know which kind of staff I'd rather have teaching my children.

Sounds like he's the Tory government's dream inspector, a bit like Chris Woodhead.

Bet the idiot Gove loves this guy...

Nice.

Sir Micheal Wilshaw, you sound like a cock.

A previous Chair of Ofsted, that twerp Zenna [made up name] Atkins, famously said that all schoolchildren should have a 'shit teacher' because that taught them about life.

She got over forty grand for two days a month of that.

Nice work if you can get it.

Yes would love to know what this guy is paid. I linked the guardian article to my facebook page, I've never had so many comments on a newspaper link. Some of the comments on the guardian page make an interesting read too. The majority seem to be as astounded as the rest of us.

Remove Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education - e-petitions
epetitions.direct.gov.uk

eh?

So things are going really well when staff are miserable, demotivated and hate their job?

Yeah. That makes sense.

What a fool

Ofsted seems to attract berks.

i like 'discuss'. i personally read it as 'wtf?'

I'd like to read the whole article, but then I think I'd have to kill myself. But, the description of his school sounds positively victorian. Not many of ours would learn much in that environment

Here it is

OFSTED is nothing but a job creation scheme for failed teachers.

I work for an academy, part of a rapidly increasing academies trust. The head of that trust said he believes that the government is out to increase failure in schools because that will make it easier to privatise education. Make it look like it really isn't working and you have the reason you need to bring in private (profit making) companies to fix it all.

So utterly depressing.

What makes me very angry is that some former OFSTED inspectors are hiring themselves out to schools on a consultancy basis to help them achieve outstanding grades in their inspections.

Schools are actually paying for this out of their budgets.

Obviously the quote about low morale is just nonsense but he does make some interesting and even valid points. I came from a home plagued by unemployment , deprivation , neglect and criminality. My teachers understood but never excused anything. Every missed homework and late was sanctioned. I can remember having a wobble as I started my A Levels and thinking about University. It was difficult as I was working long hours and I knew that if I wanted to go to my preferred uni I would have to cut down on work and perhaps not work at all when I went to uni. I tried quitting saying that my live was too hard and that he was expecting too much of me. My teacher quite firmly told me that if I wanted to succeed I was probably going to have to spend at least the next ten years working harder than most of the people around me, not doing less . He was right , without support, role models , financial backing, appropriate discipline at home etc , it is harder work. Therefore if children from deprived backgrounds want to succeed they have to accept they need to do more than other people not less . It is shit, unfair but unfortunately the truth.

I have worked in a school with crap results, awful discipline and ineffective teachers which reassured itself that was doing a good job because it was in the top 10% nationally for CVA. This lead to a culture of the young people in their care being allowed to be half hearted . Sadly one of the reasons we did so well on value added was because the primary schools were doing such a bad job. Therefore they came to us, a school doing a little bit better than another shit school, and seemed to e making progress. As a teacher, I found myself being sucked into this culture. Spending more time doing "social work" than teaching . But many of these kids had social workers, they has counsellors etc, what they needed was the school to get tough and focus on academic learning. I am not saying that pastoral care does not matter, it does, but the balance has to be there.

My only way out of deprivation was through education, I knew that and yet I worked in a school that offered these kids everything but academic qualifications.