Brenda Bullock: How can teachers find time to teach?

Jul 7 2008 By Brenda Bullock

I had thought that years in education had inured me to the insane pronouncements of successive government “think-tanks” and policy-makers, but they have now, finally, topped all their previous idiocy.

I really wonder sometimes if these education decision-makers have ever been into a real school or a real classroom or have ever seen a real schoolchild.

Just how, I wonder, do they think that any schoolteacher who may, in the course of the working week, teach anything from 150 to 200 different pupils, actually know every child he or she teaches well enough to formulate a meaningful scheme of work for the whole year for each individual child?

How will the time be found for each teacher to do this for each pupil? More likely the schemes, codged up in a frantic burst of activity to meet new Government deadlines, will be so vague, waffly and plain inaccurate as to be worthless.

Incidently, while teachers are beavering away at these work schemes, how will they have the time not only to make detailed lesson plans for every lesson, but to brief individual parents with the plan for their child’s lessons?

I wonder if parents, receiving this information, will be convinced that this was actually taught in a lesson, or will they suspect that serious classroom disorder led to the plans being nothing more than fiction?

For argument’s sake, let us suppose that 30-plus children in a literature class each has their own personal study plan. How, given such widely differing plans, will any teacher actually be able to teach anything?

With the best will in the world, in a 40 minute lesson a teacher will only be able to offer individual attention to a child for just one minute, leaving the other 29 to their own devices, presumably to copy out half-understood material from books or the internet or try to complete worksheets on topics that the teacher hasn’t covered in detail in class due to not knowing where to pitch the lesson to appeal to pupils of differing ability.

Will some slower children still be on Act I of their Shakespeare play, while others are studying Act V?

After muddling along, doing just what their study plans expects of them, and not a jot more, children will be tested on their knowledge “when they are ready”, which presumably means that some children, somewhere, will be taking exams every month of the year, according to their teacher’s assessment of their readiness.

Will employers, I wonder, be keen to take on a pupil who took his key stage three tests that are currently taken at 14 at the age of 16? And will the bright child be able to take their key stage three tests at 12 and their GCSEs at 14?

Finally, have the architects of this grand plan given any thought whatever to the opportunities such an entirely fragmented classroom experience gives for serious disorder? Does anybody believe that “personal study plans” will render every child placid and hardworking and any meaningful input from a knowledgeable teacher irrelevant?

Or will, as I fear, those who try to work, or those whose personal plan marks them out as slow learners, be bullied, while the “disaffected” either cause mayhem or give school a miss altogether?

This ludicrously half-baked policy is ill-judged, unnecessary and entirely unworkable on a variety of levels and, if introduced, might well put the final nail in the coffin of state education given, as it does, the green light to the lazy and feckless to negotiate a persona plan that allows shiftlessness and lack of any progress, while at the same time throwing the exam system into total chaos.