Photo by Ramakant Sharda on unsplash

Teachers do their best. I know they do. I worked for 20 years in classrooms, am married to a secondary school teachers, and I have been involved in teacher education for more years than I care to mention. I know teachers do their best, and I know the pressure they are under. Those who are at the peak of their abilities tend to go the extra mile to care for and support the children and young people in their charge. But teachers are under pressure to ensure that all the children in their classrooms perform. This tends to mean ‘teaching to the test’, at the detriment to everything else a child could learn at school. Teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate, because they can’t cope with the relentless requirements imposed on them. They are just as much victims of an oppressive, metric led system as the students they strive to teach.

If we want change in the classrooms across our nations, we need change at the top. We need leadership instead of management for the teaching profession. Governments seem obsessed with trying to keep up with their neighbours, to ‘drive up standards’ and to prove that their school system is better than any other school system in the world. It’s all about league tables, metrics and performance.

Teachers need more freedom to be able to teach across the curriculum, promoting skills as well as knowledge, and preparing students for the world they will inherit. Children don’t need to learn how to score high grades in tests. They need critical thinking skills, a sound knowledge base, literacy and numeracy skills, and they need to be given freedom to express their creativity.

Below is a poignant excerpt from a resignation letter written by Zoe Brown, an assistant head teacher in inner city London, that highlights many of the issues and challenges for the teaching profession today:

‘In some ways I don’t feel like a teacher at all. I prepare children for tests and I do it quite well. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, as it’s not provided my class with transferable, real life skills during the process. They’ve not enjoyed it, but now they know how to answer exam questions. They can do test questions but they’ve not had the time to do anything else. Worse than being a teacher in the system is being a child, at the mercy of it.’

The complete resignation letter to the then Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, can be read on the Washington Post site.

Victims of the system by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.