Teach Primary Issue 19.5

criteria I now have to follow, according to the school’s marking policy. Strangely, a personal comment at the end of the child’s work is not required, but merely optional. Sad to think that individual teacher feedback, once so crucial for pupil motivation and improving performance, is now seen as non-essential. Just recently, I met the parent of an old pupil who told me that it was the teacher’s personal, written response that had been so encouraging for her daughter at primary school. Not the ‘over’ highlighting I now witness (almost as bad as the old, red pen crosses all over the page) that generally just seems to require a full stop, capital letter, comma or spelling correction, with pupils having little need to consider their composition, audience or effect of their writing. It’s a robotic formula that leads to a robotic response, which I confess I find difficult; I like the wider discourse, the written communication; and have always felt that book margins are usefully designed for discreetly drawing children’s attention to anything noteworthy. I see teacher modelling, but almost no shared writing, minimising the much-needed opportunity for children to share their vocabulary, practise their sentence and communication skills and ‘bounce-off’ each other. The shared writing approach is the one I take, though, and we talk through both the maths and the English to gain a greater understanding and improve our practice: talk being essential to improving both children’s literacy and numeracy. This oral sharing I extend to creating writing toolkits, dispensing with the much-loved success criteria (used throughout the school) that I feel overwhelms children, often growing so long and complex that the writing becomes stifled by its heavy demands. More often than not, it includes unnecessary, technical requirements that stretch beyond the SATs grammar criteria and take priority over writing impact and enjoyment. Toolkits, on the other hand, can be discussed, co-constructed and kept to a minimum. The other whole-school approach I am discovering is the recent introduction of the Zones of Regulation, devised by an American occupational therapist. I worry that, after just half a day’s training, as a non-practitioner, I am expected to act as a mental health ‘expert’, helping children regulate their emotions in an amateur effort to guide them to the ‘green zone’ where they will be ready to learn. They may feel a little blue, yellow or even, red. I am sure that a school focus on mental wellbeing should be welcomed, but its implementation requires careful thought. It is not as simplistic as a new fashion, and its creators need to understand that children are not guinea pigs and teaching staff are not mental health experts before schools attach themselves to ‘the latest thinking’ and mistakes in children’s mental health management are made. It’s no fromme So it is that, after eight months, I decide to leave the post I had so looked forward to starting. Teaching assistants are, in the main, a very friendly bunch – but teachers can be aloof, opinionated and, at times, unfriendly. There have been teachers who barely acknowledged my existence, and looked straight through me, causing me to think that if we want to get the best out of our children, we might start by recognising our support staff, value their contribution (and I don’t just mean displays, laminating or book labelling) and show them our appreciation. I left a note for the headteacher about how I had felt undervalued and about the lack of communication with the teachers I worked alongside, but I never heard back. We have a wealth of talented teaching support workers, whose teaching capability and expertise is too often ignored, but I’m afraid it’s ‘No’ from me to the government’s big idea for retirees to continue in the workforce. Teaching assistants are too poorly paid, too often sidelined, and their many skills too often unnoticed or ignored. For this to change, a school’s positive culture should mean the whole school, or staff self-esteem will continue to deteriorate and others, like me, will end up heading for the red zone and the exit. TP Melanie Moynihan is a former teacher and SATs team leader who taught pupils from EYFS to GCSE in both mainstream schools and PRUs. F EATURE S SUPPOR T S T A F F www.teachwire.net | 33