We’ve reached the point where we think the term must surely be nine or 10 weeks in, only to realise that it’s only four! How can that possibly be? Summer seems a distant memory, not least because of the endless wet breaks lately. The pristine displays you put up in late August are already torn. And the names of the children in your class last year are but a distant memory.
No doubt, in the coming weeks, there will be appraisal review meetings where teachers desperately try to remember what on earth it was they did last year, as though dragging up the memories of a distant childhood. And, before you know it, we’ll all be fretting about hall space for the Christmas rehearsals.
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It also means we’ve had our new classes long enough to have spotted some of their many weaknesses. They’ll have strengths, too - of course they will - but that’s not what stands out. For a start, even teachers who have stayed in the same year group this year will be feeling like they’ve gone backwards. Those lovely children who were so well-trained in your ways and who had learned so much have been replaced by a new cohort who are a year younger, a year less knowledgeable and a year less steeped in how you expect them to do things.
Establishing a routine
The wise prepare for this, investing time in September in setting out routines, practising the basics and getting the important stuff in place, but it doesn’t make it any less draining. And nor does it prevent the temptation to curse whoever had the children before they reached you.
We see it all the time between schools: secondaries blame primaries; upper schools curse middles; juniors wonder what on earth has been going on at the infants. But, in truth, exactly the same charges are made more secretly within our schools. We’re just too polite to say as much to colleagues who work along the corridor.
Can it really be that every other teacher is failing the children and we’re the only ones getting things right? Of course that can’t be true, but it still feels that way sometimes. You can picture the scene: the Year 5 teacher asks children what they know of the success criteria for a good biography only to be faced with a sea of blank faces.
Inwardly, she mutters to herself her long-held doubts about the quality of what happened in Margaret’s class in Year 4, all the while being oblivious to a near-identical situation happening in the Year 6 class upstairs. How is it, then, that we can end up with so many gaps?
Maybe the gaps aren’t there at all? Usually, with a bit of prompting, those Year 5 children will slowly start to recall their previous experience and their new teacher will be able to draw out what’s relevant. Maybe they didn’t write a biography as such, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to write to inform or to use relative clauses. Sometimes it’s all in the nomenclature.
Just as likely though, they’ve forgotten. And that’s OK. Learning is all about forgetting and rediscovering things; it’s a great way of making the knowledge stick. It’s no one’s fault, it’s not a flaw in the system, it’s just the nature of learning.
There’s one great way of reducing the negative impact it has, of course. What better way to “activate their prior knowledge” than to know what prior knowledge they should have. That might mean having a conversation with Margaret, or the English leader, or - heaven forfend - another school!
Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School, in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979
