How do I move past this?

[Utterlypdoff]

Small primary, for the last term 3 members of staff have been off sick.

Meanwhile the rest of us who show up every day have been through hell, including a terrible Ofsted 6 weeks ago. For two of the staff it is part of an ongoing pattern; challenged about performance = off with stress. They have done this for the past few years at our school and it happened in their previous workplaces (small community.) The other is more likely to be genuine.

I know I will be considered unreasonable and lacking in compassion etc, but I am really angry, they left the rest of us to pick up all the shit and they will swan back in September expecting a warm welcome.

Any tips on how I can act professionally and move past this. I have lost almost all respect for them.

I am quite a few years out of teaching now and this is an example of where I think the teaching profession has it back-to-front.

Surely a workplace situation which leads to three separate members of staff being signed off sick due to performance pressures, indicates that there is something wrong with the workplace?
Turning against each other only exacerbates the pressure.

I have been in other workplaces for 8 years now (paid equivalent to MPS) and not had a single day of stress-related sickness. Whereas in teaching I certainly had a number of days or short episodes of absence that were stress-related.

For what it is worth, I do think that practice was too relaxed before the National Curriculum and then the National Strategies reforms. Teaching in the 1980s and early 1990s was far too haphazard and failed many children. However, although I approve of much of what the New Labour Government did, I think they made a big mistake in putting responsibility for individual children's progress onto teachers rather than onto a partnership of parents/teachers/children - once the achievement agenda was combined with the performance management that made a lethal cocktail of performative pressure...

MaybeDoctor
I think some of it is down to toxic workplaces. I've seen and heard some horrible practice from SLTs. Some of my friends have been treated in a way that was disgusting.

Equally, I've also found that weaker staff who have been subject to support plans/capability/had concerns raised about their performance tend to end up in similar sorts of schools, often because the higher performing schools in the area won't take them, or they get a fixed term contract and it doesn't get renewed.

I worked with someone who had left their last few schools under a shadow and when I met them they were quick to talk about how they were always victimised. They subsequently had performance issues at our school.

You know MN threads where someone starts a thread saying 'AIBU to think it's not DP's fault he doesn't see the children? He's told me that breaking up with his ex was the best thing that could have happened to him because she was controlling and demanding. It's been 5 years since he saw the kids because she always stops him' (in reality Ex ended things because he was a man child who did very little parenting and he's shown zero interest until he gets a new girlfriend)? Some teachers I've known do the professional version of that story.

Yes, there is definitely a sense in which you need to 'believe the stories people tell about themselves'.

But why is teaching so hard that people are constantly needing to be performance-scrutinied?

I'm not sure because I've got friends in private companies who are subject to more regular reviews and monitoring than I am.

I think there are some people who get targeted to save money, because their face doesn't fit, because they stand up to SLT and not all SLTs like that. They get intentionally scrutinised to bully them out.

The high stakes Ofsted/league tables/headline figures don't help because they dont account for nuance in student cohorts and contexts very well. That causes systemic pressure and stress, especially when there becomes unrealistic expectations (e.g. report on y11 progress every fortnight and for every child that hasn't gone up fill in this 2 page record of intervention)

However, some of what I've seen some teacher complain about being stressful (in totally reasonable workplaces) is frankly something they need to get over.
E.g. Publicised learning walks for QA - If you're teaching the curriculum and doing your job then there's nothing to be stressing over or complaining about. I'd sooner have more learning walks and no formal lesson observations.
Moderation of work - It's good to moderate work regularly to check we are all on the same page. The only people I've met who get arsey about how unreasonable moderation is are people who mark generously (and create issues with the poor bugger who gets the class next year after a year of woefully inflated marks)
Data deadlines - They're published on the calendar a year in advance. As a professional adult, how hard is it to meet a simple deadline?

Anecdotally, the biggest complainers of such reasonable expectations are people who've never done anything else, don't want to improve their practice and don't want anyone to enter their bubble unless it's a formal observation when they'll pull an old style observation lesson out the bag before back to business as normal.

I think it is important to remember that it wasn't always like this. Some of these processes have been invented in the last 20 years: what have they added? My view comes from a primary teaching perspective, including being SLT:

Moderation: yes, a sensible and useful process around teacher assessment, especially when the moderation process is teacher-led.

Data deadlines: compiling assessment data once a term should be more than sufficient for monitoring progress and reporting to parents. Any more than that: why? The only exception might be for an individual child who is receiving a specific SEN intervention.

Learning walks: I didn't hear this term until around 2007. This seemed to be something introduced purely for the purposes of monitoring and control, plus completing the SEF.

Book looks: I first heard this term in 2005-6. Prior to this it was deemed sufficient to monitor planning. It was left to teachers' own professional discretion to determine what written outputs pupils produced. If you spent a bit more time on one topic than another, it was because, in your professional view, your class needed to do so.
Sometimes there might not even be written evidence of the learning that had taken place, because it had taken place in pupils' brains rather than on a lined page!

I can see that the cumulative effect of all these processes make teachers feel excessively monitored and as if they are forever jumping to avoid the next trip-hazard. Read Stephen Ball's work on the negative effects of performative cultures...

I am no longer involved, but ultimately, teaching needs to be easy enough so that it can reasonably be undertaken by any graduate with a good academic grounding and the necessary skills and attributes to work with children. Society needs a lot of teachers. If it becomes something that only people with extraordinary levels of stamina can undertake, then people will not stick at it....Oh.

I think some of those changes needed to come in though.

If I reflect on my own school days I can recall 2 subjects where we didnt study anything for a year, one where we spend more time than was reasonable running around the room and writing in bubble writing on sugar paper. Very little learning happened at KS3.

The way I see it on reflection of my own school days, if you were bright and motivated then you would get A/A*, if you were C/D borderline then you got extra help, if you were lazy but above a C you could coast and nobody bothered with you and if you were below a C then it was essentially baby sitting because you'd do level 2 again at FE college anyway.

I've never had my planning checked as a teacher but have had book looks. I don't see an issue with it as a common sense approach.

Learning walks: maybe if people had checked what was going on in some of my lessons we might have learned more, spent less time making board games in KS3 etc. If you're doing your job then learning walks as part of a sensible overview shouldn't be a problem.

Book looks: If you're teaching what you should be teaching then you can stand by what your books look like. I did no written work for a fortnight with one class. Nobody said anything to me because from learning walks and book checks it was clear I was doing what I should be doing and therefore was using professional judgement

I like Stephen Ball's work a lot. I do think in practice that a lot comes down to differing ideas of what reasonable is.

E.g. Multiple data drops for y11 every 2 weeks is a ridiculous waste of time and probably not giving useful or accurate data to so anything with.
A marking policy of mark in detail every 5 lessons and have 4 different colours for peer and self response is a waste of everyone's time.

Both of those are an issue with stupid and ineffective school policies more than they are to do with reasonable professional accountability. The only people I've worked with who have had an issue with reasonable professional QA in schools with reasonable policies are people who want to do their own thing and then if students don't do that well, they blame the students.