Must Try Harder: 1

September. Back to work.

Pushing through the outer doors, I flashed my name-tag across a plastic-magnetic plate, and the inner door opened with a quiet shushhh. The carpeted entrance foyer was auditorium-sized and on the walls there were a number of large, glossy prints showing students in various poses, faces smiling and glowing as they engaged in learning activities. Seven terms old and the whole place still had a faint new car smell, with the aroma of stale gum and teenage sweat already beginning to add its own patina. It was just after seven in the morning and the school was almost empty and I’d come in early so as to tidy up my classroom. The school building was almost new, one of the last PFI building projects, which meant that it didn’t actually belong to the school but was leased from the firm that built it. At night when the school was empty and quiet, rooms were rented to outside organisations. My room, known to all as The Underworld, due to its location and lack of natural light, was used twice-weekly by a yoga class. Which was fine. Except that, having no natural light or ventilation, and the yoga students being both vigorous and a bit sweaty, every Monday and Thursday morning I arrived at work to find my classroom has been rearranged, the desks piled against the walls, and that the whole place smelled of stale perspiration, strained ligaments and copious lashings of linament. I’d begun coming in early just to prop open the door, allow in some fresh air and tidy the place up.

And now, despite the six-week break over summer, my nasal passages told me the yoga class had obviously been hard at it over the holidays, so as always I used the fire extinguisher for its primary purpose of keeping the door open, flicked the light switch and hoped the intermittent blinking from the striplights had stopped (it hadn’t) to discover that this morning, the first morning of the new academic year, the room smelled even sweatier than usual. ‘Spicy’ is how the kids describe it, and what with the flickering strip lights and the fact that as the school is built into the side of a hill and my classroom was actually set behind and below the main hall, there was little chance of even reflected sunlight acting as nature’s disinfectant. Anyhow, after jamming open the door, I repositioned the desks, switched on my computer and shoved in a memory stick that contained my lesson plans and other information necessary for teaching. Then I straightened up the various objects that decorated my desk: a small Beany-Baby bulldog given to me by Grace, a year eight girl a couple of years ago, a photograph of my son Joe, all dressed up in a brand new uniform for his first day at secondary school, and a copy of my wife Merlene’s most recent book on prime number theory, signed of course (and the signature was the only part of it I actually understood). Finally I went to the cupboard and got out the books ready for the first lesson of the academic year, and placed them on the desks.

My seating plan for this class, 9Z4, was based on the petrol/flame principle: I kept all the likely offenders as far away from each other as humanly possible, short of actually having them in separate rooms. After that was sorted I was ready to start my day; lessons didn’t start ‘til period 3, the two lessons prior to this being taken up with inducting the new pupils, and getting everyone else prepped for learning. This year for some reason I hadn’t been allocated a tutor group, so the only thing on my mind was to head to the staffroom for a coffee.

As I walked back along the corridor my eyes alighted on a number of new wall decorations: large, seven-pointed stars, each one a different colour: pink, blue, yellow, red, green, some were shiny gold or silver, some multi-coloured; they were dotted along the smooth walls at intervals of ten or twelve feet.  I turned the corner to find Kim-Il Ken, our Deputy Head, using blu-tac to stick more stars onto the wall. ‘Morning Dan,’ he said cheerfully.

Ken had more energy than anyone I’d ever met: there were many things you could fault him for, and I did, but enthusiasm and application were not amongst them: he was at work before six and he stayed there until after ten at night. I don’t think he took holidays apart from those odd days such as Christmas or Easter Monday when the school was legally forced to close. He would send out copious amounts of emails anytime between 5.30am and half past midnight, and even that blessed window of electronic silence was getting smaller. ‘Morning Ken,’ I replied and asked ‘What’s this?’ nodding toward the stars. He gave a furtive little smile and said, ‘All will be revealed at the briefing.’

We don’t have meetings in education. I’ve worked in five different schools now and that rule holds true for every one. We have briefings, not meetings; we’re told stuff, but we’re never asked to voice our opinion on what we’ve been told. I guess that’s because, with a room full of intelligent, educated people who are used to saying what they think, and saying it loudly to a reluctant audience, the last thing a school manager wanted to do was actually ask our opinion.

Because we might give it.  

‘Ok then,’ I said, ‘I look forward to finding out at briefing,’ and I headed toward the staffroom for that much-needed caffeine injection.  ‘It’ll be great,’ he shouted after me with much enthusiasm as I walked away.

The briefing was lead by Kim-Il-Ken, as our actual Head Teacher, Mike Godolphin, was out on a junket somewhere. The Head was out of school so often that we’d christened him Godot.

As in, Waiting For.

In the five years he’d been Head Teacher I’d never seen him further than ten yards from his own office door, save for his occasional forays into the staffroom for briefings. He’d never visited our department in the old building or, indeed, the new one. I don’t think he’d visited any other departments either. As a classroom teacher I quite liked it that I didn’t get landed on unannounced by the Head Teacher, though part of me recognised that it’d be very good for morale if he did indeed drop into classrooms now and again. I would, if I were head teacher. I’d be everywhere. I’d want to know the name of every pupil. Godot, on the other hand, didn’t know the names of half the staff.

He called me Mike.

In the first school I taught at, we had what is known as a charismatic head: he was known to come into a class, ask what they were doing, chat with the students, even volunteer to take over the lesson. He kept his hand in; the students knew him and they knew what he expected of them. He played guitar in a soul band at weekends. Did stuff for charity. But Godot was virtually unknown amongst the students: he earned well over £100,000 a year and yet a lot of the students thought Kim-il-Ken was the Head Teacher.

‘Everyone here?’ Ken asked.

A few murmurs and he began: ‘Right guys,’ he leaned forward rubbing his hands together, as though a sports coach on a chilly field beckoning us into a huddle, ‘As you know, this year we’re bringing fresh changes to the current teaching and learning model. Big changes. Positive changes. Permanent changes. These changes will lead to an Enhanced Pedagogic Experience for the students.’ He held up a large, brightly coloured star, ‘This is what it’s all about. We’re introducing the Seven-Point-Star learning structure, which we’ll introduce to you in more detail at tonight’s training session. It’s a whole-school initiative, a rolling start, and we’re expecting that everyone will adopt it and,’ he paused for effect, ‘that everyone will adhere to it.’ He stood up straight, looked around the assembled teaching staff. ‘What we’re looking for is that, by the end of this year, in each department, everyone will be teaching the same topic, using the same lesson structures, at the same time. Once we’ve adopted the model, once we’re fully live, after Christmas, a visitor will be able to walk into, for example, any Year 9 Maths class, and find the students at the same level and learning in the same way. I know there’ll be some resistance to change, but we’re expecting everyone to subscribe to this model. Those who don’t want to conform,’ and again he paused, ‘will be challenged.’

No one said anything.

It was the very model of modern teaching.

The acme.

The epitome.

I wanted to speak up and say that every class was different, every teacher was different, and that education depended on an extremely personal and nuanced relationship between teacher and students, and that within the confines of the National Curriculum, only the teacher could judge how and when to best pitch a particular part of the scheme of work, when to begin or conclude a particular subject and, on occasions, when to depart the battlefield altogether, the easier to re-engage at a later date. I wanted to say that the idea that we could teach like Stepford Wives or behave like widgets on an assembly line was a complete fallacy; that it wouldn’t work. I wanted to argue that Command Economies are by their very nature dysfunctional, that they replace initiative, ownership and enthusiasm with regulation and structures and, just like the Soviet Communism or the inner-city tower blocks of the 1960’s, these regulations and structures looked great on paper, but were extremely dysfunctional in reality. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Like everyone else I remained silent because, let’s face it, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

A few weeks ago I watched an edition of Newsnight in which two journalists, one of left-wing persuasion and the other from the right of the political spectrum, argued the pros and cons of teaching. ‘The problem is,’ the right-winger complained, ‘the teachers have too much power.’

If only.

We don’t choose our classes. We don’t choose the students. We don’t choose the curriculum. We don’t choose the content. We can’t choose to exclude a violent or abusive student. At William Edward Arnott Learning Village we didn’t get to choose what homework they were given, or when. Even the reporting system consisted of ticking boxes of pre-written comments. All we got to do was write our lesson plans, and mark the books at the end of the day. With a bit of teaching thrown into the middle. And now, it appeared, Ken had decided that he was going to control how we wrote our lesson plans and actually taught the lessons, too. (At this point, in the interests of balance, I must point out that the left-wing journalist was just as misguided as the right-winger, banging on about the underclass and stuff. And between the two of them they didn’t understand more than 1% of how schools worked). Anyhow, we were looking at yet another girder being welded into the overall command-structure that was replacing the free-thinking in education for which teachers are notorious. God forbid that young people should be taught to think freely. They might invent stuff, or have ideas, or tinker with systems and actually improve them. They might challenge authority, question the status quo, and that would lead to change, would lead to progress, when all anyone seemed to want to do was hit targets. So much of education, I realised, was a mix of bluff and fakery designed to appease Ofsted and the League Tables, that the desire for school management team to control every variable, though self-defeating, was understandable.

Eventually the briefing finished and we departed the staffroom. Back to the only thing that made sense in education: the classroom. Despite the stroganov of regulations, the competing and conflicting instructions from the Government, Ofsted and every other special interest group with a finger in the learning pie, the special pleading, the counter-intuitive funding models, the obsession with bringing about social change through curriculum modeling, the downplaying of learning and knowledge for its own sake, the grade-chasing and every other nonsense initiative we encountered on a daily basis, the classroom was still a good place to be. It’s why I became a teacher in the first place. It’s why I was still a teacher.

I opened the door to my classroom to be met afresh with the stale, pungent odor of yoga-sweat. I figured it had had the whole of the six-week holidays to marinate and be absorbed into the walls; it wasn’t going to shift easily. Then the bell rang for registration and I smiled to myself. After the summer off, and as much as I enjoyed sitting in my garden, beer in hand, listening to the radio, the prospect of teaching, the prospect of reading books for a living, which is essentially what I did, made me happy.

It always did.

Read the prologue here:

Read part 2 here:

Buy Must Try Harder here (originally published under the pen name Daniel Ken).