Back to School - but mind the potholes

As school teachers in the area enjoy the long Christmas break the news that the litigation culture is alive and well will go some way to ameliorating their worries about the impending return to the classroom.

Today's Daily Post reports that quite a bit of cash has been paid to teachers and pupils over the past few years for incidents which led to injury.  But you have to wonder about how some of these 'accidents' happened, with pupils and staff falling into potholes, tripping on cobble stones, sitting on dining room chairs and being buried beneath several mounds of equipment. Falling into potholes? And did they fall or...

Having said that, teachers do a stressful job - really stressful - and it's not helped by senior management who spend lot of time covering their own backs, doing as little real teaching as possible and generally worrying more about how they can retain their own, extremely well-paid positions than the teachers working at the coal face. There are - is has to be said - exceptions, but these are few and far between.

It's a curious anomaly that the management in most professions move away from practising the very skills that earned them their positions in the first place. Teaching is a prime example of this absurd situation.  The higher up the career pole the teacher slimes, sorry  - climbs - the less actual teaching they have to do.

Let's take an example - say, a fictitious secondary school in the area, Ysgol Bryn Dandelion. Their least experienced teacher will be given the most classes to teach, so their timetable for, say -  a 30 period week will consist of teaching 26 periods, with only four periods of so-called None Contact time, during which they will almost certainly be called on to 'sub' for another member of staff stricken with illness, terminal confusion or who's been sent on an Organisational training course, providing they remembered to post off the application form in time, of course.

Now, many of these teaching periods won't be in the same - or possibly even - adjacent - classrooms. So the member of staff whose own training centred around lesson preparation, marking, homework assignments, differentiation, materials preparation, presentation, targets, cross-curriculum theming, the Welsh Dimension and - if they're lucky - something about the subject they actually studied to degree level for three years, will have to grab their papers, books, planners, lesson plans, pens, pencils, rulers and personal effects, push their way out onto a corridor far too narrow for the hordes of creatures varying between 11 and 18 currently free of the classroom restraints and now ploughing their way between various rooms with a verve and determination that would make Genghis Kahn think twice about tackling, and attempt to survive the human torrent long enough to reach the next classroom in which they're slated to teach, and where they find thirty 13 year-olds awaiting their arrival with the sort of anticipation animal specialists note in wolf packs prior to an attack.

For those who know little about education, which would include many of the past members of Ysgol Bryn Dandelion, it's worth pausing a moment to explain how the average initial lesson with a group of first years  - or year sevens, as they're now confusingly named - often works. People outside of the education world often have very strong views on teachers and teaching, mostly woefully uninformed and based on their own, hazy memories of life in the convent. In reality, however, the deceptively simple task of giving out new exercise books and labels and then getting the children to write their own names, the name of the subject and their registration form on the book will take about 40 minutes.  Why so long?  Because of that 30 children, seven will complete the task quickly, neatly and perfectly, ten will confuse their name with the subject name, five will be unable to spell the subject name, two will forget which form they're in, three will have no writing implements whatsoever, two will misspell their own name and one will have a panic attack, need the toilet, destroy the book, wreck the label or any one of a dozen other highly unlikely, utterly improbable but almost inevitable experiences. Thus, the average newly qualified, degree-holding member of staff will have to combine the skills of logistics orderly, surrogate mother, sergeant major, foreign language specialist, counsellor, psychiatrist, lion tamer, psychologist, counter-terrorist specialist and - oh yes, teacher for 26 / 30ths of their working week.

Now, if we examine the role of the senior management - the Head teacher - an entirely different picture emerges. It's unusual if the Head Teacher actually teaches, so their knowledge of what is happening in the classroom is based on their own, hazy recollections of an environment they spent most of their working life attempting to escape. They'll have a pleasant, plush office, a secretarial staff at their beck and call, and - if they actually do any teaching - you can be pretty sure it'll be to some highly motivated, distinctly delightful sixth formers (or year 12 and 13s, as they're now known). The Head Teacher of a school is supposed to lead, inspire and set the tone for the school, but the reality is that far too many, having attained the relatively stress-free, none-teaching role of administrator, prefer to sit back in their little towers and pronounce from afar on matters of Mission Statements, acronyms and organisational import.  There are, however, many in the teaching profession who believe many head teachers adhere singularly to the philosophy of  Creative, Realistic, Attainable and Pertinent management.

Happy holiday.