Is teaching a profession?

Now, I am not one for attacking teachers, they generally do a brilliant job often in trying circumstances. I for one would not relish the prospect of a classfull of sometimes disruptive, sometimes challenging, sometimes 'lost' pupils, with no escape route for when I have had enough.

This blog on the Sutton Trust's website however, challenges the suggestion that teaching is a profession.

I would want to differentiate between whether teaching is a profession and whether (all) teachers are professionals. Let's be honest, in some schools we can find those who do the minimum and 'deserve' to be performance managed (or whatever the latest vogue term is for saying "you are not performing to the required standard, either get with the programme or get out"), just as we find exemplars.

What would the pupils think?

We end every meeting with the question "How has our time today contributed to improving learning outcomes for pupils?" The discipline of addressing this questions flows through to both agenda generation and our work in the meetings and really focusses the mind.
I commented at the end of yesterday's Raising Attainment Working Group that, apart from all the rational stuff about curriculum and teaching approaches etc, it just felt like one of the most worthwhile meetings I had attended for some time.
This observation got me thinking about two issues - firstly the place of feeling in modern-day education (as a people-developer and leadership coach I subscribe to the view that the Western approach to business misses a trick by being too rational) but much more importantly "I wonder what our pupils would have made of that meeting?" After all, it is ultimately for their benefit that we spend all this tine in meetings and it would be really interesting to find a way for our primary pupils to express an opinion on how they thought we were helping.
I would be really interested in hearing from anyone who has sought the views of their pupils on the usefulness of GBs etc.

New Head, new skills?

So, the Head who so skillfully steered us out of Special Measures has found another job in pastures new - good for him!

This leaves us recruiting our 2nd Head in 18 months and I am wondering about the skill set needed for the new postholder. The IEB recruited the old one before I joined and clearly did an excellent job, now we are out of Special Measures I hope that we are able to give thought to how different the skills needed for a progression from Special Measures to Satisfactory are from those required to go from Satisfactory to Good and even Outstanding.

In my 'day job' of developing leaders, we differentiate between the skills needed for Transformation (which I would equate with getting a school out of Special Measures) and those for Continuous Improvement (which might more closely approximate the slow but steady slog of climbing the Ofsted ladder). All that stuff about situational leadership starts to play out for real when we have an opportunity to match our new recruit to the (slightly less urgent) needs of the situation and the (improving but not yet complete) maturity of the followers.

Let me suggest one big difference that I sense is appropriate - management (c.f. Leadership) ability. When a school is in Special Measures, the focus is almost exclusively on raising attainment and indeed IEBs are instructed that this is to be their primary focus. Quite rightly, some of the more mundane aspects of management are allowed to go by the wayside in the urge to get the education of the pupils back on track. However, things like Health & Safety, Policies & Procedures, SEN Provision (to name just three in which I am particularly interested) do need some detailed attention at some stage. One lesson that SM offers is which of these 'management' topics are really important and which ones can be left to dry out in the cold wind of school improvement - a lesson to be carefully learned.

Policies, policies, policies - and some that are not!

As part of our ongoing journey to convince our Ofsted Inspector that we are doing well enough to be released from Special Measures, we have been looking at every policy the school has/needs - after all, governance is about much more than 'simply' improving performance and anyway these Policies should be such as to aid, in some way, the performance of the school.

 First move - ask our LA for a comprehensive list of those policies that we are required to have. We got a useful, and somewhat daunting, list of 36 documents they think we must have.  Well, here's the DfE list - 23 items and by their own admission it might be out of date and only covers Statutory Policies and not any 'required' by statutory, or indeed any other, guidance.

Why does a Maintained School need:

• a Pay Policy when our pay rates and terms & conditions of employment are determined nationally? 
• an Admissions Policy when admissions are determined by the Local Authority? 
• ...and a host of other bits of paper that could be generalised by the LA who control such maintained schools and are ultimately responsible for many aspects of their operation? 

It seems to me that hours must be wasted writing/re-writing/badging documents that could be handled much more efficiently by one person in the LA. Indeed, at one school where we found a serious lack of formally approved policies, we simply went through the model LA ones and put our school name in them. It took hours, achieved nothing other than satisfying some box-ticker from Ofsted that we did have policies in place. But we were 'legal'! Let's get on top of the bureaucratic burden - I know we need to ease it for teachers, and we need to ease it for governors too not least because we volunteer our limited time and I would rather spend it on topics over which we have some direct influence.

OU courses for Governors

Well, as trailed a couple of months ago, I am back! I am now a member of an IEB for a failing primary school in Bradford. They are on the recovery path and I hope to be able to add something by way of my leadership and business expertise.

I was pleased to hear that Bradford is willing to use IEBs - it seems to me that when a school enters Special Measures there is a prima facie case for getting rid of the current Head and Governing Body, after all who else can be held to account for a failure of leadership and management? Not the pupils, that's for sure.

Anyway, as I was trailing through some stuff I found out that the Open University are offering a huge range of FREE courses in governance - check this link out . Gotta be worth a go!

I may be back!

Well, after a bit of a break, I have been approached about the possibility of joining an IEB for a VERY local primary.

I have always been a fan of IEBs in principle - after all, if a school fails Ofsted then there is surely a prima facie case that the leadership has failed the pupils and should be removed. The same, of course, applying to the Head.

Looking forward to developments....

It's all over now - or perhaps 'for now'

Well, last week I resigned both of my governorships. Sometimes, you just have to focus on other things and I would rather not do the role at all than simply turn up every few weeks for a meeting and then ****** off again - for me It's a full committment or nothing.
I did this with much regret, yet in the knowledge that both schools are now equipped with great leadership, great staff, great kids, great pupils and a great chance of even more success in the future.
I have really enjoyed my latest stints as governor both giving and learning (mostly about patience!) in a new environment.
So, no more entries for a while - be well and keep up the good work...

The role of students in recruitment

The NASUWT recently published some data on teacher's responses to the use of 'Student Voice', so I thought I might write up my current views on the topic.

Students are the primary recipients of teachers' practice and wisdom, teachers need to be respected by those pupils (it's earned, not granted by right of position), need to be able to communicate effectively (the meaning of a communication is the response you get) and to be able to engage students when either or both are stressed.

Why should those recipients (we would call them customers in a different environment) not be involved? I used to involve my staff in decisions about their peers and theri bosses - they had to work with them so let them have a voice.

The challenge then becomes how to engage pupils most effectively in the process and how (much) to value their input in the final decision. That might be the topic for a separate blog, here I want to stick with the principle of pupil involvement.

Obviously a teacher liked by the students but who has no technical knowledge or teaching ability would be no use, equally a teacher with the best knowledge and teaching credentials would be no good if they could not actually enage the students. Would you employ a great teacher who could not communicate effectively with their peers (or 'subordinates' if they were seeking a management role)? I hope not. Likewise someone who comes across well to the interviewers but cannot connect with the kids is likely to be a weak link.

The students have their place in the process, as I said above, the challenge is to give them the right place and weight and to equip them with the right tools to be abel to contribute effectively (and what a useful skill that will be in theri futures).