Schools issued with 743-point behaviour checklist

Under advice, I've removed this article temporarily from the blog. I hope to return it soon, either in full or as mildly amended as possible. Please check back soon :)

End the long summer holiday?

It's been an odd summer, having just finished in one post and preparing for a major move out to the Persian Gulf for a new teaching job. If you thought moving home in the UK was a task, you should try reducing your life to 70kg, selling any vehicles you own and arranging house lets - and all before coping with the well-meaning flurry of friends and family wishing to bid you farewell and notifying you misguidedly that no-one in Arab countries is allowed to do anything, ever. I'm exhausted despite having the long summer holidays to sort it all out in. I have a vague recollection from childhood of being bored as hell two weeks before the end of that holiday every year - but not any more. Either I've got much better at entertaining myself or have a hell of a lot more to do.

I'm a big fan of travelling and have developed a predictably dull teacher routine of one very long trip every summer holidays so setting aside my customary jaunt round Europe in order to be practical and responsible feels dismal. My feeling-hard-done-by is self-afflicted but none the less miserable for it. I keep trying to tell myself that I can use my new teaching base as a point to explore India or South-east Asia, which I've never been able to afford to get to before, again in equally long or longer holidays, but that's sparse consolation right now. I almost wish, perversely, that I only had a week to sort it in so I would be forced to make swift and brutal decisions. And so all this wallowing got me to thinking the unthinable - should we stop having a holiday of this length?

Ah - I can hear the hissing of teachers nationwide through strained teeth, like angry geese. Or perhaps something more aggressive than geese: threaten the long holiday and teachers turn positively lupine at you. If you're the Daily Mail this is because they are cossetted public sector spongers with no sense of what a real job looks like: witness this typically-poisonous article slyly tarring teachers for not wanting to work hard. Anyone in the industry knows otherwise. And yet many of us would confess that the fixed structure of (almost) nationally-identical term dates makes no sense at all. Isn't there some middle way in discussing this?

There are multiple good reasons for cutting the long holiday, and we can start by dividing them into (mostly) uncontenious reasons, which teachers wouldn't see as an attack on their rights or sanity, and the cultural assault reason propogated by opponents of the profession. To start with the uncontentious: (1) Teachers pay more for their holidays than anyone else because the fixed dates create a high-demand arrangement. Embittered, we have attempted to afflict all other parents with this same heightened cost, by insiting children can never, ever, ever be taken out of school on holiday in termtime - or they will fail everything, ever. Sane parents nod politely and remove the child anyway, not least when a summer in Rome or Paris is infinitely more educational, in the holistic sense, than grinding through those agonising last two weeks of exhausted term, filled with wasps, DVDs and French bingo lessons. (2) Half-terms are an astonishing waste of time. In my experience in every post I've ever taught in, there's a 50% chance I'll collapse into illness and exhaustion at the start of every holiday, and start to feel human again about 4-5 days in. This makes a half-term week-off effectively a protracted illness followed by a weekend too busy on the roads to go anywhere anyway. Half-terms have never ceased to irritate me in their worthlessness, and I had rather have a couple of long weekends scattered through a full term, and three weeks at Easter and Christmas instead. (3) The terms are woefully imbalanced. September to Christmas, descending into darkness and SAD despair (additionally fueled by commercial cynicism) is a Promethean torture; the period to Easter is comparatively sane at first, although grisly with failing resolutions, rising in panic towards exam season and then summer a confusion of testing and bizarrely shortened weeks trailing away into purposeless nothing. (4) The long summer holiday clearly harms most the prospects of more disadvantaged children, a well-documented phenomenon, nodded-to amongst wider points by Mick Waters in the TES recently. You might argue his article should be taken with a pinch of salt - the opening line is a give-away that here is a Labour-era educational guru repositing to apply for high favour under the Tories - but Waters has always been a credible champion of young people and his points are valid despite the kow-towing to the Gove line. Most importantly, he also hits: (5) teachers rise and fall in energy levels in unison, which cannot be good for a collective body or the institution it forms. Everyone in schools knows there's a tide in a term, and we all ride it together - ten thousand staff morning briefings around the country in the last week of each term are filled with headteachers wearily paraphrasing Henry V's "Once more unto the breach...", in varying levels of irony and sincerity - and we are indeed like a force-marched army grinding to a useless halt as the campaigning season runs out. Consider that students work much less hard than us (NB, please, Michael Gove) and keeping them at school more consistently would (a) be good for them and (b) be welcomed by most parents; the key to Waters' point is an implicit acknowledgement that you would need to keep teacher days at 190, while  students study more; teachers would take some of their holiday allowance in term-time. This has complications to which I'll return below. But at the very least you could change term dates to make more sense.

Sigh. Didn't we go through all this debate a decade and more ago? About five-term years? We did. In my (Gloucestershire) experience it got hijacked at the county level, with some dimlar jobsworth going "Yeah, five terms sounds like more learning than three. You know what's even better? SIX terms. And it's easier too, cos we can just split each of the three terms not into two half-terms but into two 'terms', that sounds more and better. Great. Master will be pleased with Igor. I don't have to work anything out, but I can relabel everything to confuse everyone. If no-one knows what to call the 'half-term holiday' anymore, because now it's between two 'terms', maybe the Daily Mail won't notice their existence. And I get to spend at least three weeks of 'work' giving seminars on this tokenistic change. Gosh, I hope the Tories don't win the next election and cut my valueless post." Six terms is a nonsense, but five might be worthwhile - two before Christmas and three after, and you'd need to ignore / railroad Easter (who really cares, now? Honestly?)

And now the insincere and inflammatory right-wing reason for cutting the holidays: (6) Teachers don't work hard enough and get "all these holidays." Witness the TES community rants on this fevered issue. The real answer is simpler: teacher stress levels are far too high compared with almost any other job reports the Guardian, while the equivalent Mail article blusters about "15,000 teachers go sick EVERY day" as if it were shifty-eyed workshy malevolence - that's 3.5% of the workforce, you moron, like in any other profession on any given day. Teachers are incredibly highly stressed; their mental illness and career dropouts rates are things of horror compared to any other graduate profession; we get the holidays because we need them. The Health & Safety Executive's (impartial) analysis, replicated graphically here by the NUT, is a nightmare to observe (please, click that link and spend a few minutes looking.) It is very overtly ironic that the main parental / right-wing press complaint about the holidays amounts to "Good God, [even with nanny / childcare / summercamp], I can't handle my 1/2/3 children for 6 weeks, please take them back as soon as possible" because the implied subtext is: "to add to the 25-30 you handle for 40 weeks." (See teacher Francis Gilbert make mincemeat of parent Barbara Ellen's illogic in this structured debate.) A walk round a tourist site on Saturday in August, or Asda on any Friday night, will affirm for most teachers the complete inability of people to handle even two children compared to what we do: the plea that teachers should work hard because they're slackers is a smokescreen covering parental desperation and incompetence. Well, tough: you chose childbirth, now take responsibility. Teachers are not babysitters and our termtime workload is insanity by the standards of any other profession: in what job do you have not ONE major hour-long meeting a day but FIVE, with no time to prepare for them, and that meeting is with 25 clients, who don't really understand what it's about, five of whom want to swear at you and provoke confrontation while another ten withhold most co-operation? Name me another industry that works under those parameters if you dare. In addition, bureaucratically, teachers work extremely hard in evenings and often weekends in term-time - personally I don't begrudge this that much - but need extensive breaks to balance this. Soldiers and oil rig workers have extended, high-intensity tours of duty followed by much lighter respite windows and the same rationale applies with teaching. I am two totally different people: a work robot in termtime, dedicated heavily, professionally, and continuously, but emotionally drained and physically exhausted - beyond what most jobs demand - and myself, free to recover and have the identity and hobbies most people in most jobs consider normal, in holidays. Teachers do not have "extra" time off versus other workers: rather, we condense our stress / workload and our free time where others spread it more evenly. This is partly a necessity, because good learning should be intense; partly an effect of the fact that classes over about 18 in number (half that if there are multiple learning or behavioural difficulties) really can't be taught with genuine individual support - yet our system is predicated on contact numbers double these. Having spent time in the tutorial / crammer sector, I can tell you that I could teach those small numbers year-round without holidays at all, by comparison with state-sector classes and workloads.

This doesn't kill the argument about summer holidays. If we set aside the unreasonable argument, the good arguments for cutting it are still incredibly compelling by themselves. Why shouldn't every local council set slightly different term dates, spreading the holiday market and reducing prices for teachers and all parents alike? In light of the recent riots, differing term dates across regions would make universal dissatisfaction less widespread and enable police resources to be concentrated more easily. It would enable consultancy / cross-county support services / extended services offers to be spread more effectively for schools. This seems a non-brainer. Set your dates differently to adjacent counties and the benefits are obvious. I'm going to teach in the Gulf, where the climate dictates the calendar - only a couple of days at half-terms and a lot longer again than the UK in the summer, in order to flee the desert at its worst - but were this not an issue, or were I setting up a free school, I'd have five eight-week terms starting (like the Scots) before August ended, each with a long weekend "exeat" in the middle instead of a half-term, with 3 week breaks inbetween each and only slightly longer in summer - the same 190 days split sensibly. Christmas would be preserved but archaic dates like Easter and Whitsun provided only as bank holidays, not included in the structure of weeks off.

Mick Waters' more radical suggestions are tougher but worth a brief flight of fancy. Imagine (as I think Gove justifiably does, but sadly without doing his budgetary or teacher-workload maths) schools open 50 weeks a year, twelve hours a day. Imagine staff working the appropriate 190 days a year on rolling dates, booking their holidays to a central calendar and taking one another's classes in the same department while colleagues took their holidays, the school always having the right number of staff drawn from a pool Waters rightly identifies as needing to be 20% larger; imagine student total holidays being fewer (to the relief of parents) and with an understanding approach to parents removing students for culturally-valuable holidays in termtime. Don't baulk at the idea of leaving your class in a colleague's hands: in a good school, with good teachers (NB, ones that are not as tired as under the fixed-terms system!), and stability of (valued!) teachers to ensure students had positive relationships with all staff, there would be not only no loss but potentially a refreshing change for students in taking a module with a different staff member for 3 weeks; county groups, federations or academy groups would need to (at last) responsibly and sustainably source a pool of regular support / supply staff and cultivate them with better-than-the-current-ragged-treatment they receive; all but the smallest schools would be able to programme like this without difficulty. In other words - we'd function like normal business organisations with sensible depth of staffing capacity. Since total holidays were shorter for students, some of the (very valuable) Extended Schools provision in summer could be run alongside / integrated with normal schooling - an awkward divide at present. There is a difficulty of course, Mr. Gove - far from teachers not working hard enough, you currently have a system predicated on driving half a million skilled graduates to the verge of nervous collapse three times a year and effectively no effective staffing reserve in any school - so you currently have a term dates system structured as a prop to barely prevent that. If you want all the "Imagine" possiblities above, you'd need a 20% rise in education funding at a stroke, wouldn't you?

But at the very least - we could change to a sensible five-term year right now, without cost or difficulty, to the benefit of all. Still knee-deep in packing boxes after three weeks I may be, and with a fortnight of chaos yet to come - but even I see the sense in shorter summer holidays.

Teaching after the riots

A recurrent theme of this blog is the analogy between schools and society, teaching and government. This is no surprise: schools are our society writ small, with the same tensions, pressures, authorities, contradictions, and community issues. This week the link became stronger as many educators will have watched riots in UK city centres and known some of their own students will have been involved. Twitter has been full of heated debate between teachers, some with dogmatic positions and some (to their credit) later backing down and reconsidering - a sure sign of a skilled teacher and real role-model. How do we respond afterwards in our classrooms?

First, we need to remember that we are obliged to show patience and not entitled to outrage, as educators. We made that compact on entering this profession: to respond firmly, and to choose dialogue; to listen and consider, and to seek root causes; to forgive even while punishing and show young people that those are compatible - to maintain the relationship and enable it to move forward more strongly even when we are delivering consequences. The ancient Greek proverb, I believe, goes "After the war - make alliances." My suspicion and dislike of those who seemed in teaching to wield power because they could began strongly as a school student and continues in unbroken line today: it is not the primary role of our job to wish to punish, part of the role though it be. As such, it ill becomes an educator to use Twitter (tempting as it is in the instant in the pub or watching the fires on the news) to either rant about arresting / imprisoning / deporting / executing (yes, people said it) young people - even in the height of a riot - fine in the staff room, not fine on social media: "public faces on, please, children." Similarly, teachers will know they have a role to identify their students from pictures and sensitively address this issue with other authorities - but putting out calls on Twitter to commit to this role is a step too far: it has a clarion taste of collaboration in the negative sense, and the potential to massively damage relationships between the staff and student bodies in (especially difficult) schools.

You should have gathered by now that I disapprove of the riots - of course I do - but there is no need to become one-sided about this: you don't have to either condone or condemn - the obligation of an educator is softer in both cases, to both stand on principle against the riots, and yet to understand their root causes. To consider cause is not to condone violence, nor is anyone pretending the violence is other than just wanton criminality. But there must be a reason we got to here and it's not treachery to reflect on it. Doug Belshaw's superb short article addresses this, and I consider my article an extended unpacking of that initial plea for consideration and debate. No smoke without fire - very literally in this case.

Consider the following causes: (1) massive cuts to youth services and EMA, plus student fees rising massively - and wider cuts affecting many of the same families; (2) the youth Careers Service has effectively just been cut - at a time of record youth unemployment; (3) bankers bonuses are at £14Bn this year. On the last figure - note that the £100M repair bill the riots are likely to cause (cf Guardian) is equivalent to two and a half days of bankers' bonuses - the same cost to society, extracted in the same period of time. Both are damage to the social fabric as a result of wanton greed and selfishness - and the (apparent) invisibility of the theft-by-the-rich makes it, if anything, the more offensive. Did you realise that median banker salaries have doubled since the crash began, to nearly twenty times UK average income? It's perfectly possible to loathe the rape of our social fabric by the wanton at both ends of the income scale, and to loathe them together and equally. Ed Miliband has started to craft a narrative of this, but Labour predictably hasn't pushed properly yet on linking the riots to this.

One major vein of poison-dripping criticism - often from well-informed leftists - is that there is "nothing political" in these riots. These young people don't want free education, better healthcare, youth centres or the vote - they want stolen TVs or, worse yet, just to smash stuff for the sake of it. This is a valid criticism but it mustn't censure comments about cause: it's a bit New Labour metropolitan elite to suggest that only middle-class disaffection is permitted in the streets. People keep twittering to the effect that "these riots are just criminal, they're not political" - but this is a nonsense. Yes, they're just criminal - but while they are not politically informed or activist, they are political because they are caused by political choice and social circumstance: political is from Greek -polis, meaning "of the city / the people", so it's political because what caused this has affected so many to make them do this. Criminality on this scale IS political: were there not disaffection, the seed would fall on dry ground; note that the riots have not been ethnic or gender-specific, and their sheer geographical spread indicates tinder disaffection in multiple locations, ready to spark. @aaronjohnpeters quotes the African proverb "if the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth" and points out that a year in jail costs the taxpayer £52k; he asks "surely housing, EMA and not introducing fees would have been easier?" It's controversial but a valid consideration: fixed principles of right and order start to look questionable when the overall cost of the aftermath of cuts is greater than the programmes that would have prevented them. In more judgemental balance, @iamDanMorris brilliantly twittered that "Only in the UK could rioters in £100 trainers organising things on £300 smartphones claim to be in poverty" but we also have to remember that prosperity or poverty is relative - to your own changing circumstances, and to others in your own country. When teens see their family income being scythed as costs rise, their opportunities disappearing and see headlines reporting ever-fatter gluttony by the richest, the compulsion to react is strong. Interesting and sometimes admirable "Red Tory" Philip Blond rightly talks about the "rentier society" of disenfranchisement that led us here, but no sooner has he done that than Housing Minister Grant Shapps tweets he'll back social landlords evicting any tenant involved in the criminality, without apparent respect for context or rights - deep Tory understanding followed immediately by Daily Mail knee-jerk gesture.

An apt if obscure comparison is with the Bagaudae of the collapsing late Roman Empire: as central authority fell apart in the face of falling prosperity due to increasing greed and rapacity by the monied super-wealthy, more and broader bands of the working poor found common cause in disdaining the state and joining together in unlikely alliance to function as brigands. Whole sections of Gaul and Hispania were at the mercy of this piracy for years. This is not to suggest the same is about to happen here - our policing and legal systems are too strong, our social fabric still too good despite this strain - but clearly an argument can be made that the same mechanism is underpinning this. Protesters don't have to have an explicit liberal cause - as any teacher will know, just feeling "hard done by" is the root cause of most "kicking off": note the Reuters analysis of comment from the street. Reports of the police and Housing Benefit reforms being used to convert everything inside the North Circular into one huge monied gated community are not true - yet. We may not admire violent reaction to violent injustice but teachers, more than most, should recognise it - should recognise its potential to spread - and should recognise that, amidst the selfishness and self-importance of it, there are other root causes to address as well if we wish to avoid such incidents in future. You can't just discipline: there's more of them than us so if we force them to be our enemies, woe betide us. Authority, at the point of conflict, is an illusion - teachers knew this already, even if society is shocked this week.

Leaving the socio-economic inequality issues aside, why don't young people feel more included in society in general? Well, we've narrowed the curriculum down to core subjects and even Citizenship has become dry bureaucratic fact-listing. This is all particularly familiar to me as a (now former) Citizenship teacher: two years ago the boards changed the syllabi to make Citizenship study much more overtly political and parliamentarian, and the damage to the subject for students at my not-very-highly attaining school was awful. We used to have students below the national average engaging in multiple interesting and socially-responsible, communitarian activities - fundraising, running charity days, hosting and catering events - for animal, medical and local charities. This was all shot to pieces by what I considered an excessively grammar-school-focused new model insisting the topics had to be overtly political: about historical development of rights, or representation or international issues - worthy subjects, to be sure, but a constraint that put off most of our pupils. Good practical action - D of E stuff - was replaced by endless letter writing to MPs and local councillors. The new model literally took a Big Society model of mass civic participation we had refined perfectly in a below-average school and destroyed it - because "political understanding and written expression" was more important in the eyes of a metropolitan leftist elite. Our students were demoralised massively. Plus they wondered openly what the hell the point was in peaceful protest anyway. If you want to know why these riots weren't "political" - ask how much effect protests against the Iraq war or Student Fee Rises had. Add in the Met's grossly inept and immoral handling of the Ian Tomlinson case and you have a generation whose explicit view is: you say you'll listen to us - you don't - you take the p*** using authority to suppress all protest anyway - everyone in power is minted and getting richer and it's only those at the bottom who suffer - f*** your politics, we're gonna smash some stuff. The risk of this line of (flawed, if grounded) logic gaining momentum is massive. The riots are not the end point but a step en route. Be warned.

Also important is for schools to take some responsibility for a missed opportunity a few months ago: it's not like we couldn't have channelled this disaffection much better. There was much press coverage of schools' dilemma in responding to under-16s wishing to take part in student tuition fee / EMA cancellation protests but it was depressingly one-sided: the combined force of media pressure for conformity and order, school threats of sanction and teacher social conservatism meant most schools banned students from protest and punished those who did. But we can't have it both ways: we can't say now we want young people involved in meaningful political protest instead of mindless violence - they asked for our support and approval for doing exactly that last year and we said no - no wonder they stopped asking us or bothering to inform us. Deny a moderate request and you may get worse. Consider my plea back in January (not on this blog, for reasons of anonymity-at-the-time - I have since changed jobs) for us to not only permit but empower young people's right to protest over important political issues. We didn't let them engage in debate - we weren't co-operative - so no we face the less co-operative response. Reap what you sow and all that...

The Twitter remedies for the curriculum are coming thick and fast now too. @josepicardo / @lauradoggett say that more PSHE is not the answer - but is more core maths and English, producing yet higher levels of disaffection with school / authority / the adult world going to help? In a week where research showed that half of all intelligence is genetically determined (i.e. the non-academic may not be able to do anything about that), is the narrowly-academic EBacc going to increase the self-esteem and opportunities of our neglected vocational learners? Or will they just go and steal some TVs instead of doing yet more desk-based study? Note David Price's excellent final paragraph about the bright-leftist delusion that all poor kids can be lawyers. This is in the same week that we learned that streaming harms less academic pupils' self-esteem (apparently, the Pope is Catholic etc) - and yet we plough on doing more and more of it. We need more vocational opportuinities, more PE for the ethos and mutuality it promotes, more D of E, much much more student voice (and more meaningful), and a wider sense of communal social education which would entail valuing participation, practical action, shared moral values (NOT imposed ones) - and this would HAVE TO mean a relaxation of focus on narrow grades and tables: it's a zero-sum game between these two value sets. Twenty years ago we started cannibalising pastoral and holistic for skeletal core academic and this is a fundamental root cause underpinning the outcome of a generation that feels no moral obligation or sense of community. I massively respect @josepicardo but his statement ""More PSHE is not the answer. Society wide acceptance of responsibility is" is akin to saying - "Driving there is not the answer. All of us being on the beach in Southern France is" - you need a mechanism as well as an outcome. We do need more, and more discursive / participatory (not imposed, political, bureaucratic) Citizenship and PSHE - that's exactly what we need - and skilled debate leaders in our classrooms - a skill that is dying out because lesson standards are killing circle discussions in favour of rushed, snippeted multi-activities.

Teachers: don't rant thoughlessly about the riots - even though you disapprove. Don't publicly lead the identification of suspects - even though you will engage with that process in some form where needed. Mindless criminality it may be, but don't dismiss it as groundless simply because of that. Most of all, don't keep letting yourself and your school continue on the slow drift towards drily academic, grade-focused learning: get back to morals, and character (you might find these models or these CPD resources from the TDA-funded The Ethos Project of use) in education, get back to social action and the social compact. As teachers we aren't responsible for either the unacceptable riots in our streets, or the gross and rising inequality which is a substantial cause, nor for the generation of poor parenting that has failed in the bridge between youth and social order - but it is not a chore that we, more than any other group in society (comfortably more, after the dust settles, than the police or politicians), will have most work to do, to ensure healing and progress - it is an opportunity, and I embrace it - moderately, reasonably, open-mindedly, and always aiming to resist dogma, entrenchment and stigmatisation. I encourage you to do so as well. This is where we can make an impact, and this is what we want to educate young people for - to make a difference. Come with me. And in the interests of salvaging social cohesion, I'll say that to them, too.

Enquiry and inquisition

Teachers everywhere will know and bemoan the existence of school filter systems. More draconian than the inquisition, more inflexible than plastercast, more arbitrary than a roulette wheel, they have a suppressive and stifling effect on classroom practice. A day barely goes by without an education blogger or twitterer having a (generally justified) rant about some latest inanity or perversity of their system: wtiness, for example, Malcolm Bellamy's brief and well-written complaint. You can't check your own email in school, even on free lessons; YouTube is blocked; all blogs are blocked at a county level; almost any search term referring to anything remotely controversial is inaccessible - and so forth. Never usually one to whinge about lack of teacher autonomy and willfully stupid school processes, for once I want to do the opposite, and suggest - both that there is a way round this - and that this medieval censorship is actually an accidentally systemic feature, not the result of anything intentional.

First, eliminate the obvious idiocies, which are rare. Heads who ban any use of emails in lesson times, schools that refuse to allow *any* teacher a filter bypass, bans on teachers using YouTube - these are foolish and not that common. Most Heads, behind the curve on technology for reasons both of age and time pressure, prefer to ignore what teachers are doing and IT-competent educators can do what they need in this regard. Also ignore the fact that school filters block vast swathes on general keywords in searches - my own, for example, blocks anything containing "teen", "network", "violence", "protest", "revolution" etc - even from major national newspapers. You will imagine how difficult this has made the last few months of news coverage for Citizenship lessons... what I want to explain is how this happens in practice.

To understand how we got to the point where nearly everything useful appears to be blocked, you have to know the structure of the blocking systems. At least (I am informed) this is how it works in the South-West - and I suspect most others are the same. Imagine a tree system: many teachers to one school, many schools to one LEA, many LEAs to one region - and the whole region uses one filter company, one filter. Probably with the best intentions (to protect children - and probably even to save teachers' time) someone somewhere, without thinking it through, set the whole thing up so that when one teacher in one school asks for a given site to be banned, the whole region filter picks up the block. So everything that any teacher or IT technician in any school anywhere in the network blocks - it's blocked for everyone. It's literally a Puritan's Charter. One dyed-in-the-wool Daily Mail-reader can screw up all interesting exploratory IT-based work for everyone across several counties - and there are no shortage of people who would. It is a system which (I contend, accidentally) empowers the traditionalist over the progressive, the IT-incompetent over the pathfinder, bookwork over IT, tedious bland topics over interesting controversial ones - and all by accident. Imagine if you ran a classroom or school (primary or secondary - it doesn't matter) this way - where anything that anyone objected to as a learning activity had to be banned. Reading and maths would be out pretty quickly at the say-so of the least engaged; singing would get blocked (probably by boys) and physical activity (possibly by girls?); assemblies would go, and science for those who don't like equations and... and... and so on. Every worst prejudice and conventionality would be enforced. Now imagine everything your class had blocked also being blocked at every other school, and vice versa - there'd be nothing left. Providing a systemic "universal right to block" is fundamentally foolish, and multiplied exponentially once you have networks as large as whole UK regions. No-one wants a system where so much is inaccessible, and once you realise we got here inadvertently, it'll make you a lot less angry - and a lot more practical and rational about how not to let this limit your teaching. So despair not! From the following list of response actions you can take there will be a few, no matter what your regional system and how similar / dissimilar it is to mine, which you can use:

• Search by article, preferably on broadsheets: get students to search by article instead of pictures, and then take the pictures from the written newspaper online articles - often restrictions are more stringent on image searches (I don't know how this is done, but I've seen it.)
• Walk kids round the system by the back door: have your own site (blog or otherwise) on the WWW not on your VLE (immune to the filter when accessed externally), and extract "safe" article sections for students, with links to the full articles - students will go home and click to the link to read more fully once they're outside of the school filter. The very act of filters banning / blocking slyly makes them more likely to go away and look from home: independent learning!
• Have ready use of a full filter bypass: go to your IT technician and require them to tell you / install for you the filter bypass - don't believe them if they say there isn't one, there is, and thousands of teachers use it. I have it on my Faves bar at the top and it allows me to teach from anything normally blocked under the filter - of course I take no risks when browsing live with a class. And NO, your IT technician does NOT need to "check it with the Head"; by all means they can inform the Head (and drop an email yourself too) but if it empowers and improves learning in your class, and especially if it is critical to it, then you need to use it. Put the case strongly to SLT if needed.
• "UNblocking exists too": for most school filter systems, your IT technician can unblock whole domains at a school-level even if they are on the county / regional ban list (YES, they CAN - don't believe self-important "gatekeeper" IT techies who decide it is their choice whether they do so and who claim it is them "who will get in trouble if kids access something wrong" - NO, you WON'T, I'm INSTRUCTING you to unblock it, the risk is MINE. This can be done with YouTube or Twitter or whatever you need.
• Argue for teacher responsibility and use good, classroom-discretionary software to support it. Banning a given thing at county or regional distance is pointless, inflexible and ineffective. If your school uses a separate software system like Impero, you can take control of any one, or all computers in a room at once; you can block specific types of site or specific sites on a switch on / off basis. And by the way, what controls whether a child accesses a given site in my classroom is not the job of the IT technician to decide, but mine - I'm the teacher, and I supervise my classes carefully, and what I say goes. I do not require a minimum wage techie at a desk eighty miles away to enforce, let alone make, that decision for me.
• Make your Head read this article. If they're the panicky sort who fears the risks of the net and therefore adopts a default burrowing position on all matters IT, presuming that "if it's filtered there must be a good reason why", make them read this article to understand how this vastly disproportionate system of censorhip has arisen and managed to, without anyone's explicit intent, consume in its path so much good and worthwhile learning.
• If all else fails, do it on the sly. You will need to exercise judgement over whether to accept this advice! But before my school's (excellent, open-minded and collaborative) IT technician figured out the bypass and unblocking functions, I bought a 3 dongle and turned off my laptop's Wifi and instead used the dongle whenever I wanted to bypass the system. I billed the department for the costs and, ironically, it was this that nudged people into realising this was stupid and expensive and there must be a way to bypass and unblock - and there was, just nobody had told us. Proceed cautiously here.

Of course we want children protected from the filth the net is full of. Of course we want to avoid classroom time wasted on inanity. Doubtless we also want to stop saying "please, please stop looking at that stupid site" (even though we know we should be taking responsibility and asserting, rather than asking.) But don't get angry and rant. Don't presume there's an anti-teacher disempowering conspiracy (it's a drift, not a conspiracy!) Realise it's an accident of an ill-thought-out system and remind yourself of what you know: technology enhances learning; the real world, in all its controversy, should be the stuff of education even for the youngest; systems and technicians work for teachers, not the other way round; you need and should feel unabashed about using a bypass filter; you are entitled to decide when a specific site should be unblocked for your class / year / department / school's group(s) of children, using your excellent and appropriate professional judgement - and now, go make these things happen. Bring the world into your classroom as you see fit and don't let anyone say no.

Elitism in British education and society

It's a clever move by Cameron, you have to give him that. In the days of tight budgets, the declaration that he is going to raise the entry profile for teachers above third-degree entrants in act of "Brazen Elitism" is smart because it's simple. It will cost nothing (a few quid on PGCE subsidy is a drop in the salary ocean); it will be divisive amongst teachers on subject and age lines; it appeals to the idea that you can raise the bar by setting high aspirations (without reference to actual teaching change); it delights the traditionalist right-wing press because it is tacitly blaming teachers for educational failure; it steals Ed Balls' every-teacher-should-do-an-MA-thunder without either (a) the cost or (b) the risk of educating a profession more fully. Most worryingly, it's a brilliant steal of stupid teachers' votes, because idiots in the profession will think it designed to enhance the prestige of their role. Witness the patronising flag-waving of the opening paragraphs of the Telegraph article on the news, guaranteed to fool some.

It's also nonsense as recruitment strategy. Raising the bar of a profession does nothing to fundamentally affect the status of a profession. Changing the conditions / rights / most of all, salaries of a profession does; Fiona Millar in the Guardian is much more on the ball here. What she doesn't notice, and what is surely in the sly calculations of Osborne et al is that, since Labour have returned teacher pay to a roughly decent level (despite the NUT's claims, to which I am not unsympathetic) and solved a recruitment crisis; and since the credit crunch has set in motion a managerial-dream decade of teacher oversupply from career-switchers, the next government of any colour has some degree of carte blanche about facing down teachers on pay and conditions. Cameron could have two terms treating the profession without absolute disinterest or hypocrisy and still not have to pay the price: it took a decade after Baker's introduction of National Curriculum 1 in 1988 for the vast numbers of the offended professionals to swell to crisis, and so it could be again.

This brings us to Labour's recruitment drive early in their government. Why did they work so hard on either side of the millenium to reinvigorate recruitment into teaching? I am not disposed to believe then-and-now Labour claims that they wanted to raise standards by paying teachers an attractive salary, nor the unspoken (they wouldn't dare say anything so old-Left) thought that maybe it was catch-up payback for all the years of sub-inflation Tory pay rises. Rather, their prompt was desperation - there was a staggering recruitment crisis about to happen and they (effectively, it must be conceded) averted it by high-volume recruiting, with increased salaries and a new route in. It worked. The profession is better off. Schools are better for it. Has it made a difference?

Well... we find ourselves through the looking glass here. The great sleight-of-hand tradition in which Cameron's latest policy stands is one in which the mainstream fail to break through because of the fault of some part of the mainstream. It is divide and conquer stuff. Average parents are told - by implication - that their children would do better if state school teachers were as good as private school ones (they are usually far better); average teachers, that they would be able to achieve more if average parents did a better job of instilling obedience in their offspring; we don't approve of Grammars but we understand some average aspirant parents want to open them; and so forth. Famously, 7% of children attend private schools but form 75% of the judiciary, have access to the same proportion nationally of cadet training opportunities (leading to forces officership) and half of the top civil service. Naturally, the Milburn report from which these figures are drawn drifted into quiet obscurity, mostly ignored by the government once it had the anti-Cameron headlines they afforded. Labour's gutlessness on meaningful social mobility is depressing. And can any credence really be lent to the woe-is-us-it's-all-so-unfair claims of the independent school brigade given these figures? Additionally, industries dependent on unpaid internship work - positive-potential, expanding and / or high-paid "new economy" sectors like finance, journalism, arts, management consultancy - become, apparently without any prejudice, the province yet again of those whose parents can fund this extended education, and / or have appropriate personal links to open doors.

The difference ultimately between Labour's teacher recruitment drive a decade ago and Cameron's glitz today is that, in a similarity to Fiona Millar's Guardian narrative (in which she herself back-references Francis Gilbert's same point): this would be a bar to many good teachers - and populate the profession with idiots, in some cases. I entered teaching in that early New Labour wave of recruitment through one of those new routes - and my students' results speak for themselves. Whatever the motivation, the access opportunities, rising salary, and desire to recruit well were important, rather than a narrowing of the field like Cameron proposes. And by contrast, one of the best teachers I have ever worked with, and the best manager I have ever worked for in education, got a third - and would not now be allowed to enter teaching. Blunt tools don't work. But will more people know, and think about, these comparisons from great teachers of our own experience, than are seduced by the glib Dave headline about raising standards? Haven't we learnt yet that those words almost always presage intrusive idiocy in educational policy?

Teachers desert Labour? Because?

It's difficult to see from where a Labour election victory could come this year. Teachers, perhaps more than any other group, should be the core of the Labour vote. But, as the Guardian reports, rates of teacher support from Labour have fallen from almost a half to one quarter of the profession; Tory support amongst the profession has doubled, and now stands equivalent to Labour's own.

Partly this is the disenchantment in general of the populace in a bleak economic time with talk of cuts; and the preponderance of younger teachers the Guardian reports supporting the Tories simply can't remember the 90s, let alone the 80s; but there must also be a reflection as to why teachers old enough to know better might be prepared to countenance more of those traditional deep and targeted Tory cuts in education we know will come with a Cameron victory.

The usual reason given is initiative fatigue. Starting with Blunkett early in Labour's period in power, an endless spew of well-meaning but demanding and under-resourced pressures were loaded onto teachers, with a matching reduction in autonomy and trust. But this argument is often over-inflated, and my feeling is that there has been something of a rowback on this in recent years: more emphasis on teacher CPD, more sense of collaborative learning, a slow movement towards evidence-based policy (albeit with far to go yet.) But certainly teachers' workload remains too high; the pressure on them incommensurate with the time or support available to achieve it; and the collective national schizophrenia / have-our-cake-and-eat-it which we have about discipline-versus-inclusion means that much student behaviour remains intolerable and insufficiently challenged.

Yet, as the Guardian elsewhere reports, the years of education funding under Labour have not, as the Murdoch press would have you believe, unsuccessful: inner-city students, the most disadvantaged, have done well; particularly the core literacy and numeracy skills, the source of such constant complaint from employers, have massively improved, with a leap from 10% to 40% of inner-city students passing five or more GCSEs including English and Maths. Poor Labour; even this gets reported along the lines of the Lib Dem complaint that this simply means rural schools (and, implicitly even if no-one would dare say it, schools with low ethnic minority populations) are being under-supported. Of course the Lib Dems would say this: they're fighting rural-non-Tory territory, not for Labour urban votes. This claim isn't true; I work in one exact such school, and one in a relatively difficult rural cachement; and though we clearly do not get the resources lavished on urban schools, the wolf is certainly not at the door - not compared to mid-90s levels of funding.

It's really not that bad, teachers - quit whingeing. You may perceive Labour as favouritist, as mission fanatics, and as slave drivers - but study your history to be sure you prefer the Tory alternative. It will mean faint (if veiled) disdain, huge cuts, and only perhaps being left blissfully alone while the minister attends his children's independent school's Speech Day. Your choice.

Academies stutter as the bog standard picks up

Well, whaddaya know... it turns out that Academies are not all they were cracked up to be. For those long anticipating / salivating for their eventual and inevitable tarnishing, the apparent ever-upward trajectory (setting aside the question of just how massaged their "successes" had always been in the hands of the media-dominating politically-invested) has finally stalled in a quite spectacular way: as the National Challenge number of secondaries (simplistically read: "failing schools") has shrunk from 440 to 301 (or 247, if you wrongly ignore those that have been closed), the number of Academies in this number has risen from 32 to 41; more tellingly, this represents 20% of all Academies versus 7% of "bog standard" other schools.

Consider in this analysis (a) the vastly superior funds (b) the considerable flexibility with curriculum and staffing given to Academy Principals - effectively freeing them from reasonable constraints about fair treatment of staff which other Heads nationally must continue to meet and (c) the constant PR support of DCSF, up to its metaphorical neck in having to prove this particular Emperor of a policy is fully and sumptuously clothed, and the crash of the whole grandiose scheme to earth is extremely audible.

Those who have campaigned against Academies - from whatever stakeholder base: parents, teachers, social democrats, those fearing the nasty backdoor by which they have profilerated religious schooling at taxpayer expense - this will inevitably feel like a victory - so notice it and think about all the consequences. Of course we were right all along: schools can work to combat social deprivation factors, but cannot have a major impact, and no amount of throwing money at a new school building, "rebranding" the same institution or blazering-up the same students - nor tedious stock visits from the local bishop / minor industrialist will transform anything that the infinitely less glamorous chalkface efforts of thousand hard-working teachers will do. And just maybe - shutting down a school and changing half the staff on a fantastical whim about "fresh blood" will not improve, but will damage schools because students need consistency, and because relaunches - as any sane teacher could have told you - only last about 3 weeks in education anyway, period.

Of course we should look at this the other way: a national reduction in failing schools (however stupid and dangerous the whole National Challenge badge is) by a clear one-third is a huge gain. No amount of Daily Mail nonsense about Labour relaxing education standards can justify that: clearly, from any viewpoint, a fundamental improvement in standards has occurred in the weakest-performing schools; a disproportionate benefit of this will go to the most needy young people, and that is a cause for true celebration.

For those who championed Academies, this is a wake-up call. For those who have mocked, reviled and loathed them - whilst a brief moment of gratification is deserved and permitted (could you ever have been wrong?) - now comes the task of trying to use this evidence to win the wider public debate about good comprehensive schools, the danger of stealth religious education, and the pointlessness of dated business models in difficult schools where experienced educationalists and not former "business leaders" are needed to lead.

And for those who have been angered by the name-and-shame of National Challenge - including my own school, one of those 139 who rose this year above the threshold and out of National Challenge - we might perhaps reflect that, complain as we will, perhaps such public criticism, and such demanding initiatives, aren't always without positive effect; perhaps Ed Balls isn't always wrong; perhaps he's just wrong about Academies. Food for thought.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jan/13/tenth-schools-miss-gcse-targets

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article6986476.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084