I love teaching young children and wherever I’ve worked have made positive relationships with my colleagues. I’m good at what I do and really do enjoy teaching.
In many ways my job is a teacher’s dream. We have no lesson observations or book scrutinies.
No-one checks our planning or does learning walks. I have complete freedom to veer from parts of the curriculum that I feel are not as important as others.
I am fed a delicious hot meal for free twice a day, my classroom is beautiful and massive and the school grounds are very spacious and beautiful.
The majority of employees are kind and friendly.
BUT… The management are liars, they don’t allow any feedback and treat you as though you are a difficult child if you suggest more efficient or updated practices, they are a boys’ club and my department is solely represented by one woman who just agrees with the rest of the men in senior management and never EVER circles back to important issues in our long, often pointless drawn-out staff meetings where nothing is ever decided.
It is doing my head in!
She piles loads of work on my team and I’m the only one who does it but she doesn’t notice this and just praises my whole team, despite knowing that everyone else leaves at 3:45 and I’m always there late.
Many of the teaching assistants are awful, either point blank refusing to do anything or shouting at our boss because they aren’t happy with the classroom they’ve been asked to work in the following year. One drinks alcohol in their keep cup at work and also refuses to work.
Perfect strangers in the management team who dont come across us from one year to the next carry out our 2 yearly appraisals and our line manager has no input. TAs have no performance management at all and are even asked to spy on teachers who are on performance management plans and feed back to our manager.
There is no feedback at all from our line manager and I’ve had colleagues leave who have been given bad references about things like not answering parental emails quickly enough but this colleague had only ever been told they were great. When my manager was questioned about why she did this she said it was the head master who wrote it but when my colleague asked him he said it was our line manager (more likely because we never see him!)
Eventually she admitted it and offered to retract this but by this time my friend hadn’t got the job.
My team asked for a phonics scheme and were told we’d spent £2000 on one a few years before. I reminded her that I had bought the resources and it wasn’t £2000 it was £500 at which point she giggled and said that the dusty old phonics books donated to us by the SEN dept was included in that sum. I asked if we’d had to buy them and she said that she’d just rounded it up to £2000.
We are allowed to run holiday clubs but members of senior management take cash in hand and get their random wives in to run them while we have to be taxed for this.
I’m beginning to see thar my line manager is quite a bully (not to me) but I’m feeling as though there’s no way of being fully happy somewhere where nothing is run properly.
My line manager gaslights the bejesus out of all of us and bullied others while not doing her own job properly. She writes fake data into our end of year results and seems not to understand the most basic maths.
I want her to leave and am baffled as to how she’s managed to secure the position she had. It’s like being managed by someone with a very low IQ and the upset is all so unnecessary.
I don’t report for the obvious reasons.
Should I leave or stay for the benefits?