Forging Ahead?

Or forging a Head?

When I last visited a school classroom, nearing five months ago, I found the experience to be somewhat unnerving. It wasn't that I found the children difficult to relate with, or that I was uncomfortable with the subject matter being taught, or that the teaching staff were in any way hostile to my presence. No, there was something else.

Many of the staff members I already knew. I had known several of them for years, one or two of the longer-serving teachers I'd known for decades; I should by rights have felt more at ease with the surroundings. Other members of the staff that I had known had moved on, a few to new and different challenges. A healthy turnover of the ongoing workforce? Maybe so. 

Over the years it has become increasingly difficult for me to relate to just how committed are most of those in the teaching profession. During previous visits to the afore-alluded-to school I had sometimes stayed on, after the staff had already undertaken a six-and-a-half hour day, simply to take on the role of a second adult during an additional hour's commitment to the cause of education. Members of staff already harbouring several hours of preparation and marking were, frequently at this juncture, preparing to voluntarily further-extend their working days.



Knowing that my day was already complete I would sometimes then opt to also enjoy the shared experience of relating to children who were, entirely through personal choice, simply soaking up knowledge and immersing themselves in the problem-solving experience that this extracurricular time had secured for them. It additionally afforded me the time to catch up with old acquaintances. Naturally the school in question received an absolutely glowing Ofsted report, naturally.

But, my most recent visit fell somewhat (and sadly) short of expectation. Although even this- the 'expectation'- had of late become increasingly tempered. And I traced that 'increased temperedness' to the arrival of the New Executive Head. I think that I had first met 'Him' in a corridor as He swept along the narrow spaces with his entourage of newly-appointed non-teaching staff. He stopped and 'smiled' in my direction and then introduced Himself. We conversed briefly before He was on his important way.

Nothing to see here, folks. He was a PR man, neat and tidy and with the requisite full and colourful pallet of newspeak-educational phrases, ready triggered to roll off the tongue like so much cheap honey, that of the very sweetest nature. I doubt He would have stood out in any of a thousand offices up and down the country. Maybe not such a surprising thing in today's crisis that has substituted for normality. It was more the manner in which the children had viewed the man that I found to be most unsettling. Those children who had clocked his presence seemed unsure, curious but not curious enough to approach or to even speak to the man. I doubt He would have noticed.

After He had glided on to his required destination I heard the nearest classroom teacher reassure the children that He was indeed the New Executive Head, although she wasn't quite so scathing. The tone was decidedly more a reverential one than one of shared outlook. There was a sense that both teacher and pupil were rather on the outside looking in, somehow excluded from something entirely more elevated, pedesterial even.



The deck had, at my last visit, been shuffled, several of the longer-serving members of staff had been ushered towards the exits. A secretary had gone, as had a caretaker, another cleaner, support staff, a teacher. After I had returned, several times under the new regime, I became curious as to why the children remained quite so remote from the man. Did He never teach, could He not find the time to address the school, via an assembly for example? I asked questions of the members of staff that I knew best, obviously not the children, that would have been most unprofessional. The answers were as revealing as they were vague.

Upon leaving the school, after my most recent visit, I pondered briefly as to why a visitor to the school (myself) should not have been questioned by the New Executive Head about additional voluntary hours worked, or maybe thanked for so doing, or perhaps even have been acknowledged as having done so. But I only pondered this conundrum very briefly, because I think I already knew the answers.

I have since learned that the New Executive Head has recently informed teaching staff that they are not being paid to sit and to drink tea, thus that the morning break for members of staff had been effectively cancelled, and that the teachers would henceforth be expected to find things to do in respective classrooms whilst the children played. I guessed that a New Executive Head wasn't the sort of busy person to notice that staff also used these times to discuss ongoing educational issues, such as curriculum and even the welfare of certain children. Truth be told, it was difficult to gauge what He may have thought, as He importantly spread his time about the various schools under his 'caring' wing, or perhaps did something else more becoming of his New Executive Head's salary. I doubt He would have made any comment upon the numerous unpaid hours worked prior to the scheduled start of the teaching day, after the scheduled end of the teaching day, or during the scheduled midday lunch break.



When I last visited the aforementioned school it had been bandaged within several hundreds of metres of chain-link fencing, the inadequate car-park had been further inadequately armed with a regiment of particularly unforgiving speed bumps, the curriculum suitably scoured of the more creative subjects, instead tweaked for tommorrow's successful linguists and mathematicians, also those of a lesser linguistic and mathematical bent and those of a linguistic and mathematical ineptitude- at least they would now be fully armed with an awareness of this ineptitude, fully.

The New Executive Head's office door- no longer set invitingly ajar- had been closed and emblazoned with something newspeak-educational-one-liner, inviting the children to go away and to solve their own crises. I think that it had read, "Don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions." I believe that suchlike has become something of a management and 'leadership' mantra in thenewUK.com. Perhaps Philip Green had once hidden behind something very similar? The office in question was now that of a New-Executive-Head-busyness, except that it was empty, devoid of life, because the New Executive Head was non-specifically elsewhere; perhaps not quite yachting, but certainly not pulling at the oars.

The school had reeked of those newspeak educational values: Extra unacknowledged unpaid hours worked had seriously trumped work-breaks, working relationship with pupils had been well-and-truly trumped by application of relationship with government values, Ofsted had trumped humanity. Humanity's worth was in serious decline.

'Forging Ahead' or 'Forging a Head?' Very much more of the latter, I fear.