Abba, like chocolate liqueurs and honeyed nuts, is a guilty pleasure I indulge in too much at this time of year.

I find myself playing their 1980 track Happy New Year regularly throughout the season. Like many of Abba’s hits, its upbeat chorus disguises something overall more thoughtful and melancholy.

One particular part pushes me beyond nostalgia and into a minor existential crisis: “In another ten years’ time,” Agnetha speculates, “What lies waiting down the line, at the end of… eighty-nine?”

As a child of the eighties looking back from 2018 at a group for whom 1989 seemed impossibly distant, it’s dizzying.

‘The worst year-group ever’

2029 is pretty close compared to the late 1970s. But our perception of time is tricky and in education, it can be completely misleading. For one thing, people are prone to believing that things are getting worse and too easily forget what went before.

The classic is the “worst year-group ever”, a description thrown around every year and then promptly forgotten as the next year group moves up and has it applied freshly to them. That’s the least-damaging example.

I started teaching just over a decade ago and have seen vast improvements in our approach to education.

We have moved to more progress measures in accountability, and away from attainment, so that we’re focussing our efforts on all students, not just a narrow band.

Fighting gloom

Ofsted has removed individual teacher gradings, making it harder for poor leaders to shift blame from institutional failings to frontline staff. In my subject, English, the emphasis of assessment has moved away from memorisation and regurgitation to creativity and confidence.

Yet we too-quickly forget the horrors of yesteryear and easily buy into a narrative that we are fighting a period of “gloom” in education.

Under that banner, the progress agenda can be wilfully opposed by those who never really wanted to have to teach the most challenging students or to have to challenge the most-able.

Ofsted can continue to be blamed for lesson-observation pressure that is actually created by dodgy consultants and insecure leaders. And it’s easy to bash subjects like GCSE English because all we do is spend lessons memorising the names of Dickens’ children, right?

Putting pride back into the profession

The most encouraging change of the decade has been a revolution in the culture of expectations and a new sense of wanting to bring about a positive change.

Ten years ago, if a sub-group such as poor, black, teenage boys was underperforming, the approach was to slap a statistically-improbable SEND diagnosis on them, pick up some cash to burn on ineffective interventions, and congratulate each other on removing any accountability or expectations for those young people most in need.

This decade’s shift in funding away from whoever was handiest with an application form towards actual economic disadvantage, finally recognising the unjustifiable disparity in outcomes between the wealthiest and least-wealthy students, alongside a bloody great spotlight on the progress of that latter group, has renewed the moral imperative of teachers and put pride back into the profession.

‘Leadership needed, not just funding’

But there were legions reliant on the old racket. The one-time special-needs coordinators and armies of old-school “I’ll just read and write everything for you; you do what you want” classroom-assistants, not to mention the cynical headteachers whose tiny intake of disadvantaged students was in inverse proportion to the neverending middle-class parents willing to fill in learning-needs assessment forms, will keep trying to pull us backwards.

I’m not blind to the funding problems in education. “No more champagne,” in Abba’s words. It’s most apparent in my sector, further education, that has been starved over a much longer period and that has inexplicably not benefitted from initiatives such as the pupil premium, despite often serving much-more-deprived cohorts than the most-vocal school leaders.

But I did see school funding at the height of 2000s profligacy; a national challenge secondary awash with cash but sorely lacking capable leaders and teachers.

Sure, the windows opened automatically when the CO2 in the room rose to a certain level, and every room had its own bank of netbooks, but it was an educational disaster because nobody tried to achieve anything with the students.

‘Don’t forget the past’

“May we all have our hopes, our will to try,” says Abba. I believe those two things need to go hand in hand. Education is full of people with hopes, but it’s the people with the will to try who’ll shape the future positively. We need a hell of a lot more of them.

This is the bitter paradox the government has to swallow. They need to invest, a lot, in education, specifically teachers, even though ministers undoubtedly perceive us as unendingly hostile towards change and accountability.

But the amnesiac, reactionary, unrepresentative voices we’re characterised by illustrates precisely why we desperately need better funding in 2019.

To consolidate the quiet majority of resilient and unbelievably-hard-working teachers with more like-minded professionals means offering pay and conditions that are attractive and commensurate with a high-status role where intelligence, kindness, and an ability to inspire are the minimum prerequisites.

“May we all have a vision every now and then,” Abba encourages. I don’t think it goes far enough. We need to have a vision and hold onto it firmly until it’s achieved. Whether that takes a decade, or longer.

Andrew Otty leads 16-19 English in an FE college. He is an ambassador for education charity Shine