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

Possibly about the only thing OFSTED are going to like about my school then...

I may be wrong but I am sure that Mossbourne was notorious for burning teachers out due to the very long work days. So I do think there needs to be some balance .

However I agree about the point on performance related pay which has become something of a formality in many schools. If it is just another step on the payscale to keep good teachers in the classroom , fair enough. But don't call it performance related pay . I also think that some of the satisfactory schools I know of are anything but satisfactory and that is not saying anything new. Most people know that in education terms satisfactory means anything but.

I do think there is a phase when you are trying take big changes when morale is low . People like certainty. Often change means people having to accept that beat they have been doing isn't enough and that is not a comfortable feeling. However that is different from explicitly aiming for low morale. Usually if the changes you are putting in place are effective there is a temporary surge if morale before settling again.

It may be that he worded it wrong , although part of being in charge of OFSTED is making your self understood.

I agree that something has gone very wrong with education generally. What makes me the most angry is that it has failed the people who need it the most more than anyone else.

What an absolutely idiotic thing to say.

Bonkers.

amicissima I think you're right, something has gone badly wrong, but the problem doesnt start and end with teachers and schools. Schools need to be doing much more, definitely, we have children starting in year 7 unable to read at all, barely able to write, not many, but up to a dozen in a 150 pupil entry - and that is disgusting imo. But when you call home and they couldn't be less interested and mum has never worked, gran has never worked, dad isn't on the scene and there is no aspiration at all - it is very difficult to get that child to achieve. When from 14 they are all out drinking every weekend, there is a big problem and it isn't one the school can fix on its own. There is a whole section of this generation that doesn't see any value in acadmemic achievement or working to improve ones lot.

mollybroom I think that there needs to be high morale amongst employees when a leader is making changes. I believe a good leader would do this by making the aims clear, communicating how the aims were going to be achieved and involving everyone in the process. Low morale is not good for anyone, and a staff with low morale can only be bullied into action.

Performance related pay and school-specific pay rates may cause problems for staff wanting to move jobs. I'm not sure how that will work.

I sympathise with secondary school teachers who have to deal with children who come from families with no work ethic. Goodness knows how we deal with that, particularly as all young people are seeing their friends finishing school/college/university and not being able to get a job.

Don't you think that target setting is bad for children's morale? Some fail to reach expected targets when they are 7 years old: and they continue to fail, fail, fail..... each year, they're told time and time again that they didn't reach targets; they've got to try harder; got to attend extra classes; got to do classes in the summer. No wonder they begin to feel a bit pissed off by the time they're 14.

I never said that we should aim for low morale, in fact I said the exact opposite. However often morale can temporarily dip when we challenge ourselves to do something new. Often there is an initial high and then a dip before it raises again.

There is already an element of performance related pay; to go onto the upper threshold. In some schools I have worked in everyone gets the pay rise. I am just making the point that there is either performance related pay or their isn't. I know that in my own performance management I tend to set myself very challenging targets, in a previous post I was disouraged from doing so in case I did not meet that target. Well no shit Sherlock that is the point. I have failed to meet my targets in the past and it has been suggested that I tweak the data or explain away my "failure". I have always refused and instead looked at what I should have done instead.

I have worked for over a decade with children from familes who have no work ethic, that is my background.

Appropriate target setting should not be bad for children's morale. I don't agree with a culture of endless extra classes though.

What a fucking twat!

I think the aim (next year?) is for every school to have bands for pay scales, so that they can 'promote' teachers from say, the equivalent of M5 to U2, based on performance. Surely there will need to be some homogeneity in the banding otherwise it will be difficult to move school.

'Failure' can sometimes be explained away because there are extraneous circumstances. Our performance management this year for pupil progress has an attached sheet with individual reasons why targetted children may not reach targets (e.g. attendance, SEN, etc). There are often valid reason for 'failure'.

How many of your children hit targets mollyBroom? Do you set realistic or aspirational targets? I know my ds, at his grammar school, was set realistic and challenge targets, and was constantly hounded by teachers because he wasn't meeting them. It made him give up. (It would have made some children work harder, I know.)

A good teacher know who to set targets that are both achievable and challenging. I teach students who at the moment are struggling to meet their official targets, so I have broken them down into steps that look achievable.

Within my targets I usually have a clause about attendance, even then you may not meet your target and it is entirely appropraite to look at your own teaching and what you could have done better. There may be reasons for failure but there is always something to learn from it.