I have tried to make this as un-identifying as possible so I’ve edited facts a little and some is quite vague. Sorry it’s really long.
I was on maternity leave and returned to work just before Christmas in a new school in the same MAT as my previous school. I am now having serious concerns about how suitable I am for this school or possible for teaching in general. I’d love some perspective because I feel lost.
I have a year 3 class who had between 5 and 10 supply teachers last term. The school has a very high staff turn over (3 others joined at the same time as me) and I suspect I was the only candidate for the job. There is very low moral amongst staff, especially teaching staff. I am feeling overwhelmed and stressed already and I feel like a lot of what I do is a waste of time. I love my class and I feel like I could make a difference for them if I stayed in the post until the end of the academic year. They desperately need some consistency after so many supply teachers and they are a lovely group of children. However I have several serious problems in the school.
The SLT are obsessed with data, Ofsted and SATs. I must hear those words 20 times a day or more in a surprising variety of contexts. For example, my phase leader told me not to worry that my class found telling the time confusing because they’re unlikely to get a question on that in the end of term test paper because there were lots of points for it in the autumn term test. The children have all been told if they are exceeding / expected / working towards, but most of them don’t know what they should do to improve. The progress data must be updated on the excel sheets every 2 weeks, but as far as I can tell, it isn’t being used for anything. There are 5 children identified in my class as failing the Y1 phonics test at the end of Y2 and again just before Christmas, but there isn’t any kind of phonics intervention in place for them. There are also children identified with maths at the expected level for a reception child, but there isn’t any kind of focus group work for them, they’re just doing Singapore maths with everyone else.
Planning is stifling. We have to plan 2 weeks in advance (5 hours 50 mins maths week and 6.5 hours English per week) and give in copies to SLT. The SLT do learning walks most days and they bring the plans with them. If you’re not doing what it says you’re doing on the plan then you need to have annotated the hard copy of the plan to explain what went wrong and why you’re not on track. I hardly know my class so I find it very difficult to predict what they will be able to do by the end of the week let alone by the end of next week. I want to be able to edit my plans depending on what happened in the last lesson.
Planning must be in a very specific and time consuming format. The old planning from last year was deleted from the network because the format was changed, so we are planning everything from scratch. I end up planning at home most of the time, but I do not have a school laptop. My laptop is a mac and does not have microsoft word. The planning must be in the grid which is only saved in microsoft word. I re-made the grid in the mac equivalent of word, and handed in the hard copy of my planning on that, but I was told I would need to copy and paste it into the correct grid because my boxes weren’t exactly the same size and I didn’t have the right font. There are so many boxes, and the computers are so slow, that copying and pasting 2 weeks worth of plans took me about 30 minutes. All because Ofsted apparently want to see consistency across schools in planning.
The medium term plans expect me to cover way too much. I am supposed to do Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 3 weeks with an EAL heavy year 3 class. They should have the opportunity to do 2 pieces of extended independent writing in that time and one formal comprehension in silence (used to update the excel sheet on reading levels) every week too and we must have grammar, spelling and reading foci in every lesson. We also have an hour of reciprocal reading per week as part of English and the text should come from the (very expensive) comprehension texts box. Medium term plans for history and science are also very limiting. Each lesson must answer a pre-set question (but there are no resources to go with it because they all got deleted) so there is no time to answer the children’s questions. My class were really curious about children’s lives in the historical era, but the questions mostly focus on buildings, neighbourhoods and cities to cover geography too. I’ve been authorised to find or make texts about the history topic to use in the English comprehensions. There is a very obvious local trip for this history topic which I suggested, but the school only do one trip per year and it’s as a whole school, so that’s not an option.
We do not use a digital register system and teachers are responsible for telling the office staff to phone home for high-risk children on the first day of absence and all other children on the second day. We are the also responsible for checking whether the phone call was actually made. Teachers are expected to notice any patterns in absences, eg/ one child always misses Mondays and report this too.
The marking policy is very time consuming. I have to mark correct or good things in green and wrong things in red and write which of the success criteria they achieved in green and a target in red. The children then reply in purple and I correct their reply in pink. When they self or peer assess, they use yellow and pink highlighters for good and bad things and write their comments in orange. Their books look a mess with all of those colours all over them but presentation is a huge focus, for example, they’re supposed to rub out the margin if it’s not exactly 2 squares wide. I’d rather they got on with the maths with a 3-square margin than wasted another 5 minutes rubbing out and it drawing again, but it's not my place to make that decision.
There are year group meetings, phase meetings, key stage meetings and whole school meetings. Each level of management has a specific focus and is doing book and planning scrutinies to check that their focus is being satisfied. It feels like everything is the priority to someone, from presentation to independently written sentences explaining mathematical reasoning and methods. A whole school meeting started with the English lead telling us that we needed to provide a high and low example of exceeding, expected and working toward writing, annotated to show which criteria had been met where to be used as an example bank for moderation. She openly stated that they had done this last year and not used them.
My final issue is with how incidents are recorded. Each class has a box full of big postcards, one for each child. You have to write any incidents (injuries, behaviour issues etc) on their card, so incidents involving more than one child have to be written on all of the relevant cards. It’s very time consuming and not very useful. Apparently the purpose of this is so that is an angry parent goes into the office to ask about an incident, the SLT can simply take the incident card and use that in the meeting rather than disrupt me while I’m teaching for me to tell them what happened.
Is this just what teaching is in the UK now? I’m working 10 - 11 hours most week days and probably 4 or 5 hours at the weekend to do everything and I can't keep doing it. To cut down, I either do all of the random extra stuff and muddle along without enough time to plan creative, engaging lessons, make useful resources, or enough brain bandwidth to remember their birthdays and the little things which matter to them, or I focus on the children and giving good lessons but fail on everything else and end up fired with a terrible reference. I don’t have enough time for my own dc if I do everything. I am on a probation contract so I could leave at half term, and I’m really tempted to return to my previous career, but I don't want to disrupt my class again and I love teaching.