Is it a meme? Or just a social media in-joke? Whatever it is, it’s definitely a thing. Somebody posts about their hilarious bad-hair day, or their fancy-dress efforts, or their botched DIY attempt, and you can be pretty sure it’ll be there in the comments somewhere: “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

It’s a sort-of tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the human tendency to exaggerate and embellish - and it suggests, jokingly of course, that we should all be ready to prove our actions or have them disbelieved.

That’s fine for social media. But in much the same way that text talk has no place in the classroom, I’m far from convinced this constant, exhausting “prove it” culture does either. Not when the thing we are being expected to prove is simply that we’re doing our jobs properly.

If you teach, you’ll probably know what I mean: practical lessons shortened by the need to fill in safety evaluations of every activity, photographs of your active maths session (otherwise who’s to say you didn’t just sit there for an hour with CBeebies on?), verbal feedback stamps as “evidence” that you actually have bothered to read your children’s stories, even if you haven’t written reams of marking.

I reached the end of my tether with this brand of accountability earlier this year, as I stuck photos into children’s topic books. They’d been doing some outdoor learning and my teaching assistant had painstakingly ensured that every child appeared in at least one photo. I had multiple copies of different photos to ensure there would be enough for one each, all sorted into pre-organised bundles and each with a personalised blurb explaining what the children had been doing to go with it. It was half past five on a Thursday evening and I wanted to go home. And then the wind blew in through an open window …

I’m lucky. The pressure to do this sort of thing doesn’t come from my senior leadership team, who are sensible about work-life balance. And my own personal teaching philosophy is increasingly focused on one key question: will this benefit the pupils?

In the example above, the children had enjoyed their outdoor activity, they’d made some key memories and practised some skills, and a smattering of photos were already on the website for their parents to enjoy. So no, I’m not convinced that their exhausted teacher spending her evening sorting through photos was going to benefit, well, anyone.

In fact, exhausted, stressed teachers are likely to be actively less good at their jobs, so it’s not even just that this sort of thing is benefit neutral - it could be actively detrimental in certain circumstances.

And yet somehow I still feel like I should be doing this level of what amounts to evidence production … It’s crept into teaching practice and become commonplace enough that I feel like a “bad” teacher somehow if I don’t do it, even as I rail against its utter pointlessness. I worry about parents, Ofsted and even media narratives about lazy teachers every time I make the decision not to adorn my exercise books with “I worked in a group today” stickers, not to mention the potential impact on my progression in these times of performance-related pay.

Accountability gone mad

So, what’s going on here? Part of it, undoubtedly, is tied up with accountability culture in schools. And yes, accountability matters, because teaching is an important job - too important to avoid scrutiny. We’re well used to inspections and league tables and the importance of being able to hold teachers to high standards when it comes to what they do - because that’s what children deserve.

For all of the criticisms of league tables and exam results, at least they are based on outcomes for the children (albeit depressingly narrow ones sometimes). This idea that there should be some sort of paper trail for every lesson we teach floats independently of its impact on the children. It literally suggests that without such evidence, teachers probably aren’t doing their job properly, despite the fact that between observations and drop-ins and the fact that, y’know, children talk, it would become swiftly obvious if a teacher had dropped the ball.

No wonder it’s an approach that is utterly corrosive to morale as well as hugely insulting to teachers’ professionalism and autonomy.

Even more than this, though, playing this exhausting game is time consuming. It adds yet another layer of paperwork to teacher workloads, yes, but it also takes up actual teaching time. If your teaching assistant is lurking with a camera as your children attempt group discussion work, then they’re not available to facilitate for the children who find such activities challenging. If you’re busy writing “verbal feedback” on your books then you’re taking precious seconds away from giving the feedback - seconds that matter when you’ve already got 30 children to try to speak to. The irony is that in trying so hard to prove we’re doing our jobs well, we’re essentially giving ourselves less time to do our jobs well.

This is all particularly depressing because we have tried as a profession to tackle these sorts of issues before. It’s a massive victory that Ofsted no longer expects to see any particular format of planning, for instance - especially when I think back to my early career where both my weekly and daily plans were frequently scrutinised as if they might contain the secret of what sort of teacher I would make. The change in emphasis now means that those of us who prefer to scribble 3am moments of inspiration on whatever piece of paper comes to hand and those of us who prefer a perfectly formatted and colour coded pro forma can play to our unique strengths without fear of judgement.

More recently, we’ve been told that marking - as long as there is consistency across a school - will be similarly left free of value judgements. But this “proof of teaching” isn’t quite marking in and of itself and regardless, old habits can die hard, particularly when they are tangled up with teaching culture.

It’s important, then, to remember that part of the idea of removing the emphasis on planning and marking as any more than a means to an end was to focus ourselves on what really matters - namely, what the children actually learn. And this is still not actually served or promoted by insisting even active learning must generate paper to go with it.

Finally - and only somewhat flippantly - in these times of environmental awareness, isn’t it a good thing for us to be actively looking to reduce the amount of “stuff” we produce? If photos are on a computer, isn’t that evidence enough? More importantly, if the learning is in our children’s heads, isn’t that enough?

Of course, there are plenty of meaningful activities where, obviously, paperwork is produced as an integral part of the meaning. I’m a fan of children improving their writing, for instance, by doing as much of it as possible. I’m just saying: let’s stop trying to shoehorn it in if it doesn’t naturally belong. A 100-word photocopied blurb about how the children spent their 24 May maths lesson measuring lines around the school ultimately serves no one. Not me, not the student, not the parent, not the head, not the school.

So, I’m aiming to start my own one-woman rebellion. I’m going to try to banish the guilt that says I’m being less than conscientious if I don’t take pictures of every activity. I’m going to ditch the stickers that explain what the children have done - because the children already know. I’m going to let learning be its varied, mercurial self - and I’m going to send my class into the world as walking, talking proof that I am actually teaching them something. Really, they’re the only proof that matters.

Kate Townshend is a teacher in Gloucestershire and a freelance writer. She tweets @_KateTownshend

This article originally appeared in the 14 June 2019 issue under the headline “The burden of proof”