My non-teacher friends look at me with unabashed envy. To them, it seems that I go on holiday every five minutes.
They are of course completely wrong. Take our current six week holiday: one week to recover from accumulative exhaustion, two weeks of proper holiday if you’re lucky...then the build-up to A-level and GCSE results begins.
If results were only about the kids and their life chances, our lives would be so much simpler. Somehow, those individual stories: the breakthroughs, the breakdowns, the calls beyond duty, the believing in them - when you’re not sure what you believe anymore - are all a sideshow now.
Instead, teachers mainly worry about what child potentially didn’t follow their formulaic instructions about how to reach a target grade.
Too often these days, teachers’ personal performances take precedence over the students’ achievements. The anxiety associated with falling below target and the ensuing impact on pay defies - and defiles - the imagination.
Perpetually shifting grade boundaries within a seemingly ever-changing curriculum also prevent teachers from ever truly switching off. As one former head of English once said to me: ‘No one wants to be asked: “Wayne managed to get their middle set to 80 per cent, why didn’t you?”’’
Even if you are personally satisfied with how your students performed, residuals easily unsettle that.
Finding out that your little superstars performed better in other subjects will snatch away any sense of accomplishment. Each stroke of a button on an Excel spreadsheet wears down your morale as the sulphuric stench of competition spreads throughout our schools.
Hunger Games infighting
Heads of department (HoDs) are pitted one against the other, which creates subtle infighting reminiscent of The Hunger Games. Informal put-downs around the tea-point speculating about why little Kiera performed so well for RE and so abysmally for history escalate to whole staff meetings where departments are named and shamed. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
I remember one new head of department confiding to me that one of her Year 11 classes was “keeping her up at night” because they were the lowest performing in the department. How would she win the respect of her HoD colleagues with such humiliating outcomes?
The difficult questions HoDs have to face in the aftermath of disappointing stats on A-level and GCSE results day is spine-chilling. The hardcore meetings with governors, school leaders and the rest to explain why it happened and why it won’t happen again are based on the preconception that children are robots and that, with enough well thought-out provision mapping, they can be programmed to jump through the hoops.
Teachers are expected to have a crystal ball where they can foresee pitfalls and intervene ahead of time, while often teaching the most challenging groups.
The monumental shadow cast by results devoid of context means that the all-important narrative of pupils and their lives is brushed off as “making excuses”.
Teaching is for humans who know they’re human. This will be all too easy to forget in the coming weeks.
Hannah Sokoya is an education consultant based in London
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