Once upon a time, children sat exams, exam boards marked them, candidates, schools and parents accepted the marks without question, and everything in the garden was peachy. Exams were the final narrow gateway on a meandering journey across a colourful, pastoral landscape called school. For reasons contributors to these pages get justifiably exercised about, that journey is often now a forced march along a laser straight footpath to a sorting hat. That, and a whole gallimaufry of assessment bad news stories and responses to Ofqual’s new policy on appeals has got me thinking about how teachers perceive their job. More interestingly, how they might be encouraged to perceive their job.

So what can teachers do to counterbalance the incapacitating stranglehold that national - and local - performance-management policies driven by exam results, currently impose on them?

One of the difficulties that I’ve often faced working with teachers is understanding exactly where their loyalties lie. As a postgraduate trainee working in a Midlands school a lifetime ago, I can still recall the shock when a young teacher talking to me in the staffroom explained how disaffected with the management he was by using this woefully ungrammatical, but nonetheless memorable phrase: “I’m for the kids, me.” What he was really saying was that he had rejected the entire employee/employer dynamic that every successful organisation relies on. He was, in effect, blithely working in a vacuum of his own making. It’s a view I’ve heard expressed, and a reality I’ve observed, many times since. It’s a revealing dilemma to pose to any full time classroom teacher: who and what do you work for? Try it.

Of course, schools, and increasingly groups of schools, go to considerable efforts to define their goals or vision, to put into words what they are trying to achieve. School websites and prospectuses generally make pretty high-carb reading matter.  But how many classroom teachers could quote anything at all from those pages or buy into any of the ideas expressed in them? Business colleagues of mine would immediately detect a failure of communications and of leadership in this. But they would miss the point entirely because their experience is simply and literally useless in this case.

School teaching places the individual teacher in relationships that are far more subtle, dependent and capricious than anything I’ve come across in business or commerce. There is the responsibility to educate each and every child who enters your classroom, irrespective of gender, difficulties, talent or behavioural traits. There are dozens and dozens of these unique people and they change every year. You spend the vast majority of your working hours every week in the same room with them. There is a requirement to work effectively with similarly tasked colleagues, because you are usually part of a team or department, regardless of whether you work in a primary or a secondary setting.

Then there is the next level up of senior managers, which can be anything from one or two people to an entire rugby squad these days, and always includes some kind of relationship with a single headteacher. There is always contact with a number of parents, usually by the very nature of the reasons for that contact, it is fraught and difficult. Beyond that, even in a multi-academy trust, a group of schools or local authority, there will be very few relationships a teacher has that impact on the key employer/employee dynamic. In a web of this complexity, is it surprising that loyalties are unpredictable?

If you look objectively at this map of an individual teacher’s key relationships, I think that there is one specific layer that is the most demanding, yet usually the most neglected. In a secondary setting it might be a subject department, in a primary setting an aged-based group, but most teachers will find that immediate small team of people carrying out identical or very similar tasks to each other, is the one where most of their loyalty lies. It is the one where they have the most impact and the one where contact is most routine.

How many of those teams ever sit down together and definitively decide on their shared goals and objectives? When do they ever produce their vision, one they own and believe in? I don’t mean agreeing where they sit on the individual school or trust’s sliding scale of success, how they fit into a national drive for school improvement or on some ambitious, serial innovator’s empire building programme. Websites and prospectuses are full of this kind of wording. I mean when do they ever interrogate what it is they are all actually trying to do day after day?

Imagine what an early years team, a group of PE staff, or a modern languages or science department might say if they were given a blank page opportunity to define what they want to do in the schools where they work. Their visions would be so different but so pertinent to the setting and context in which they worked and more significantly, invaluable to the children they teach.

Here’s one I found, in a place where I expected to find something worth reading.