First, do no harm
Posted on 12/07/2023
FORUM’s summer number addresses the way teaching is being reconfigured by the assault on Initial Teacher Education and the erosion of teacher professionalism. It is introduced by Patrick Yarker.
The famous prime directive ‘do no harm’ isn’t part of the original Hippocratic Oath. But as a rule of thumb it’s hard to beat, and not only for doctors. Teachers, too, are given pause. They see how school can turn people off learning, or away from activities that make for learning, such as reading. Since the end of the lock-down period the National Literacy Trust and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study both report a notable decline in the number of children in English schools who say they read for fun. Can so dismal a state of affairs have nothing to do with the policy of ‘phonics first, fast and only’ or the requirement that, above all else, teachers ready their students for tests?
More and more, school turns people away from teaching, too. The DfE reports that in the academic year 2021/22 almost 40,000 teachers resigned from English state schools. The figure represents 10% of all qualified teachers. It is the highest number of Full Time Equivalent resignations since records began a dozen years ago, and a jump of almost 20% from the previous annual figure. Meanwhile, the proportion of the teaching workforce aged under 29 continues slowly to fall, as it has been falling for the past 7 years. It is true that more people entered the profession than in 2020/21, but the number of those entering who are newly-qualified (as opposed to those who are returning) is down. And has been almost every year since 2015. [All these figures can be found here.]
Teacher-recruitment stagnates. The crisis of teacher-retention intensifies. Government resists boosting teachers’ pay in real terms or discussing ways to improve conditions. Instead it pursues the dream of a standardised model of what it is to be a teacher. The DfE has tightened its grip on the content of the Initial Teacher Education curriculum, restricting ways in which aspiring teachers (and their educators) may think acceptably about how to teach and why. At the same time, Oak National Academy is being fitted out as the chief source for lesson-plans and curriculum ‘packages’ and their associated pedagogical approaches.
The DfE’s standardised model mistakes teaching as a practice of delivery. Under it, the teacher’s task is to deliver sanctioned knowledge to pupils and students and, by closing the ‘attainment gap’, to deliver certain kinds of young people from a blighted future. By framing teaching in this way, the inherently-complex dynamic relationship between teacher and taught is denied, and state education’s entanglement with the workings of capital concealed.
Much criticized, and hardly new, this model of teaching has always justified itself by presenting an equally-shoddy conception of those to be taught. In a recent speech Amanda Spielman, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, sang the old song: ‘A good education imbues learners with knowledge, and so promotes an enquiring mind – one open to new ideas and capable of ingenuity and creativity.’ As if, unimbued, children and young people know nothing. As if their minds don’t enquire. As if, congenitally incapable of ingenuity and creativity, they merely abide until their educational imbuement.
The Chief Inspector is proud to count herself among those who over-value curricular knowledge. To quote her speech again, it is ‘the real substance of education’. That the school system privileges knowledge above ethics gives her no qualms, for how can knowing things be at odds with doing good? For her and her ilk a good teacher knows what it is sufficient to know: the curricular content. Good teachers know, by testing them regularly, what each student knows and doesn’t know. Knowing them thus, good teachers know what must be done so that each student shall know more and reach the required level in the next test. What could possibly be unethical about that?
Nor do good teachers object that the scope to control their professional decision-making and be true to the nature of their work continues to be whittled away. Amanda Spielman confirms all is for their own good, if good be rightly understood as no more than a synonym for ‘efficient’ or ‘competent’ or ‘according to expert instructions’. In her speech she says: ‘Making good use of bought-in schemes and textbooks… and moving some decision-making upstream can all help teachers concentrate on their students and their teaching, rather than creating and re-creating resources.’ As if the latter precluded the former. As if, by creating resources, a teacher wasn’t engaged precisely in making material their concentration on students and teaching.
Preparing a lesson, resourcing it, organizing its elements, gauging their likely effects, imagining what will happen or might, and what to do about it, and then reflecting on the lesson afterwards all takes time. Teaching is hard work. That teachers put in excessive hours remains a matter of serious concern. But even more important is the question of who determines what will fill those hours. Teachers have less and less say in this. Things are being done ‘for’ the teacher which are the teacher’s to do. Under the guise of lessening workload the work itself is being re-configured, and along lines which exile any practice not thought of as ‘delivery’. That is to say, any good practice.
The summer number of FORUM addresses these concerns. Contributors examine aspects of teacher professionalism and offer ways forward in constructing a more adequate teacher identity. They explore the tensions generated by the new ITE stipulations and consider why teachers are quitting in such numbers. The issue is entitled ‘The end of the teacher?’ and the question-mark is of the essence. If conditions can be changed, a better model of teaching than the one endorsed and increasingly enforced by the DfE can come to birth.