Teach Secondary 13.8

John Lawson invites the Education Secretary to reflect on his most cherished pedagogical rule – look, listen and learn... To the Rt. Hon, Bridget PhillipsonMP... Every Secretary of State for Education should appreciate that there are teachers in every staff room across the country who will have forgottenmore about education than they will ever know. Education Secretaries will happily acknowledge the ‘brilliance of teachers’, but many of those teachers will be excluded from your red carpet visits because they won’t smile politely for dignitaries when there are uncomfortable truths to address. So seek them out, and invite them to help you solve problems. You’ll reap rich rewards from listening to them. Square shapes, round holes It’s currently compulsory for young people to be in education or training until the age of 18. England’s post-16 education programme was perhaps a tweak or two away from being among the world’s finest, until the previous administration rashly introduced that requirement, minus a workable plan for implementing it. Why burden yourself with their mistakes? Most schools and colleges can, and do accommodate students wanting to study for their A Levels, T Levels and so forth – but what’s available for those who struggled through GCSEs?Where will they go for further training or education?We don’t have enough classrooms, highly skilled teachers or stimulating courses to offer them. At any given time, there will always be thousands of students who simply never flourish in school settings, studying ‘one size fits all’ school curriculums that don’t fit them. Let’s stop squeezing them into round holes and start helping them to shape their own futures. Capricious laws Following a prescribed curriculum for 11 years is surely enough. Millions of us can’t draw, act, play an instrument or fathom calculus, but can still add to our rich culture. Let’s stop focusing on what teenagers can’t do and start celebrating their talents. If 16-year-olds are old enough to vote, it follows that they also knowwhat subjects suit them best. Important as maths is, teenagers who, after 11 years of daily classes haven’t achieved a GCSEGrade 4 are unlikely to ever excel at, or even enjoy the subject. Post-16 maths for everyone was a blinkered obsession of Rishi Sunak’s that ever added up. Maths teachers didn’t request the policy change. Many of us will use arithmetic, intuition, and logic in our daily lives, but not maths we can barely understand. ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor while running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); find out more at prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano THE LAST WORD We shouldn’t impose capricious laws, or rules that are impossible to enforce – and that includes compulsory post-16 education. Instead, spend wisely and fund FE colleges so they can embrace students when they’re ready to appreciate their education and training. Compassion and respect Everyone accepts that schools have had to work within severely limited budgets (including your colleague Rachel Reeves, as per her recent Budget speech). You should therefore be heartened to learn that many game-changing ideas are both eminently workable and comparatively inexpensive. Our finest schools have visionary leaders, engaging teachers, focused students, and supportive staff and parents. We can’t turn ‘underperforming schools’ into centres of excellence overnight, but we can continually improve by following a formula that works. Visionary leaders will tell you that everything else falls into place when we get behaviour right – so let’s stop putting the interests of a disruptive minority before the safety and wellbeing of the compliant majority. ‘Zero tolerance’ approaches needn’t preclude care, compassion or respect. We cannot continue with over 780,000 suspensions a year. What should unsettle youmore is the vast number of abusive incidents that aren’t officially recorded. We need to stop accepting the unacceptable and offer – online, if necessary – alternative programmes to those for whom mainstream schooling doesn’t work. If we truly respect our students’ families, then we must challenge them and stop accepting antisocial behaviours. Weaponised stress Finally, teachers rarely benefit fromhigh-stakes observations, which can be stressful, subjective, superficial and too easily weaponised. In five minutes, supportive mentors can teach ECTs priceless insights that might have otherwise taken them five years to learn themselves. Half the ECTs I mentor can’t initially articulate the differences between discipline and punishment, and explain why maintaining composure while respecting every child’s dignity is so crucial for effective teaching. Observations provide snapshots; mentoring reveals detailed portraits. Mentors can teach neophytes what’s rarely learned in college, since the best insights tend to emerge from interactions with real students in real classrooms. Were mentoring to become normative nationwide, we would get better teachers sooner, significantly raise achievement, improve behaviour and enhance morale across the board. Promoting all of the above will ensure that you – unlike some of your predecessors – ultimately leave a positive mark on the teaching profession. Urgent correspondence 90 teachwire.net/secondary