The daughter of a teacher has asked that her Facebook posting on her mother's plight as a teacher be shared widely LINK I publish it here for you to share with others.
I'm
feeling low and a little bit helpless at the really horrible struggle
my mum is currently going through. Hopefully she won't mind me posting
about this - but I want to put it out there as it's something I really
think people should know about.
My mum is a primary school
teacher in a state school in Yorkshire, and has been for 20 years. She
is a wonderful teacher: caring, committed, enthusiastic, her pupils love
her, she has produced countless concerts, plays and choirs that have
won national competitions, and has never received anything but very good
/ outstanding reports from Ofsted inspectors.
Her school is
now, it would appear, in the midst of being systematically forced to
become an 'academy school'. Academies have been around for a while -
originally the stillborn brainchild of the Blair government, they are
now being ruthlessly implemented by the self-important imbecile - sorry,
'moderniser' - Michael Gove; a representative of an even more clueless
government obsessed with results tables and change for its own sake. But
what is most disturbing about the whole pointless affair is not so much
the staggering waste of time and resources, as the shockingly corrupt
way it is being implemented.
For the first time in the entire
history that my mum has worked at her school (which is 10+ years), the
school was judged in an Ofsted report as having 'serious weaknesses'
(having only ever been judged as good / outstanding prior to this). The
headteacher was let go, and an 'executive head' was drafted in by the
local authority, a woman who apparently has a reputation for supposedly
'turning around' failing schools (and by this I mean that she clearly
deliberately fails them so that she can be seen to have 'turned them
around' six months later).
The teachers were all subject to
impromptu lesson inspections, and almost EVERY SINGLE teacher in the
school, individuals my mum described as 'some of the best teachers I
have ever known' were failed. My mum was failed for the first time in
her career (Although on receiving this news she rather wonderfully told
the inspectors "I don't give a monkey's"). The school has now been given
six weeks to 'improve', before the government will come in to inspect
them again. The teachers are doing 16 hour days in an attempt to do an
impossible amount of work so that they don't fail this second
inspection. My mum hasn't had an evening or a weekend off for weeks. She
worked all through her supposed holiday last week. She is getting chest
pains. One teacher collapsed from stress.
My mum had been
planning to retire at the end of this year - this will be her final year
as a teacher - what a way to thank her for 20 years of hard work and
dedication to the state school system. She has always been an incredibly
strong, cheerful, optimistic person, and whenever I speak to her now
she talks of her life being a 'living hell' and 'just making it through
the next five months'. I have never in my life heard her talk like this.
And all this in spite of the fact that the teachers at her
school have been made perfectly aware that when the government come in
to 'inspect' the school, they will be doing so with an agenda. That
agenda being to turn the school into an academy - as they have done with
several other schools in the area.
Essentially, all the work
the teachers are putting in will most likely be for nothing, because the
government have every intention to fail the school so that they can be
seen to 'turn it around' and make it into an academy. It seems to me to
be the most ridiculous scam - a con on a national scale which must be
happening in countless more schools and which is abusing the time and
resources of already desperately over-stretched, underpaid and
under-appreciated teachers.
I feel very frustrated at not
being able to make more people aware of what seems to me to be a total
outrage. I am going to make this post public - please share, and if
anyone I know is interested in the story or has any suggestions about
how to increase awareness of this please get in touch. Thanks.
