Nice People 13: Nice Save

lostinrates

tom9980 wrote: »

What i am not explaining that well is everyone just needs to ease off, give teachers more power over their teaching after all they spent years training for the job. It just mystifies me why a politician with no experience in the job who did a totally non related qualification suddenly can chop and change everything. So in that regard i do not feel politics and education mixes at all well. For me an education minister, ofsted etc should be helping improve standards not beating the profession with a stick to the extent many believe every teacher is a lazy left wing nutter who is so unfit for duty they must teach by rote.

Surely the way to judge any teacher is on how well they get children to progress. A league table doesn't measure progression it measure how good the schools catchment is, how good the parents are and if a child had SEN or not. A good teacher enables a child to reach their peak ability even if that is only a D grade in Art.

What happens if you 'ease off' and the teacher up monitored is poor? Or merely average and unmotivated?

Fwiw, I am not arguing you are wrong, but there are some pants teachers out there...just as there are people failing or scraping by in any profession.

While I do not like current guidelines at all I do consider that without politics there would be no free at point of use basic education for all. There would be no one watching that there were basic standards attempted to being met nation wide. There would be less protection for teachers and students both.

Generali

LydiaJ wrote: »

Agree about increasing by inflation being necessary not to be a cut in real terms. Also, they need to increase in proportion to the school age population (which is rising), otherwise it's an effective cut in a different way.

I think the same about NHS spending. They need to give figures on NHS spending per head of UK population, so they can't claim they're giving the NHS more money when the money's gone up by a smaller % than the number of people it needs to serve.

Isn't that an argument in favour of the NHS becoming less efficient? Where I work we pride ourselves on doing the same job whilst spending less money. The department I used to work in (4-5 people) shaved about $3,000,000 off costs in 2 years.

SingleSue

lostinrates wrote: »

In the private sector afaik you didn't need qualifications but most had them, There really were some excellent teachers.

Our language staff were great, and in the main our English staff and classics were great. Science were less great. Geography was a disaster dept. and I feel very sorry for the history teacher for whom I have to admit I was trouble. :(. Its not that I didn't like her, its just she got us mid week, thurs, last bit of the day, and I was over tired and got the giggles a lot, and spent a lot of time outside, and it know she thought I was laughing at her, but I wasn't. It got so bad, I didn't have to be told to go out side, I would just get. Up and go.

I always thought my history teacher was hopeless, until I got into 3rd year and he ignited my interest in the subject...then he became the best teacher in the world. Biggest regret of my educational life was kicking out history in my options but then it didn't fit into my plans and I had promised myself in 1st year that that would be the first subject to go.

I think some of the issues nowadays is the integration of differing needs into mainstream. Now, I say this as someone who has children with differing needs (so I am allowed!), but the amount of time that is taken up with giving them the attention they need is at the detriment to the rest of the students, even if they have a TA with them.

Some can be disruptive, so even if the teacher is allowed to concentrate on the other students, the noise levels can disrupt a class, thus further making it difficult for those without needs (or even those with differing needs - youngest was in the same class as someone with tourettes, the tics would set youngest off with his tics and the other way round, it was a never ending circle of noises for the others students and two very unsettled differing needs ones being set off by the other).

It does depend on the child though rather than the diagnosis, Josh was very disruptive at primary school but was a model student at high school once we discovered that music calmed him down..he never once received a detention or time out for bad behaviour (or for anything else) once in senior school.

Youngest, even when not being stressy, still had his ministry of funny noises going on...by the by, his latest one is shouting 'cheese' at weird and wonderful moments :rotfl:

SingleSue

Bit of good news yesterday, Josh is now going to be doing all the drumming for the big school production early next month. He was supposed to be sharing it with another drummer (their normal go to person) but he has now been given all of it and the other lad moved to doing the lighting (Josh's normal role alongside audio at these things)

He is going to be a busy busy boy in the next few months, got the big production next month but before that he has a smaller one, another charity do after that plus the normal chamber concert (he will be singing as well as playing drums) plus all the uni interviews which have come in.

tom9980

lostinrates wrote: »

What happens if you 'ease off' and the teacher up monitored is poor? Or merely average and unmotivated?

Fwiw, I am not arguing you are wrong, but there are some pants teachers out there...just as there are people failing or scraping by in any profession.

While I do not like current guidelines at all I do consider that without politics there would be no free at point of use basic education for all. There would be no one watching that there were basic standards attempted to being met nation wide. There would be less protection for teachers and students both.

I agree there needs to be basic standards and that there should be ways to measure a child's ability on entering school, what their likely peak ability in the future is and a way to measure their ability at various points throughout education. All of that should exist there is no question, but maybe the current method leads to too much whip cracking and negativity. It really is no fun being told your useless despite working 60 hour weeks and doing everything possible to get your class to progress. Before the school Ofsted last year some parents with an axe to grind where starting rumours of special measures and the head being sacked as the outcome because of league table results. The inspector said he thought the school was failing based on that data but had completely changed his mind when he saw the actual situation on the ground. He would have graded the school as outstanding if those results based on 13 children were better however that group of children were not at all academic many had SEN but had all met their expected peak grades which unfortunately were below national average. If you look over the years at those tables for the school that particular year group is a big outlier in the stats yet the school got a lot of grief because of it quite unfairly.

There is one pants teacher at wife's school and she works directly with her, this was deliberate in the hope the not so good teacher learns some things and improves. The best people to work out who the good/bad ones are other teachers, pupils and parents maybe not a random person who has little knowledge of the unique challenges they face within that school/area? start with some retraining and monitoring by the known good teachers, if that fails then it is time to sack them. At the moment its really hard to sack a failing teacher (i blame the unions for that one), from what i have seen a head teacher in such a situation either puts that teacher in a place they can almost not fail or treat that teacher in a way that they will likely leave in the near future.

tom9980

SingleSue wrote: »

his latest one is shouting 'cheese' at weird and wonderful moments :rotfl:

:rotfl:

Dont worry too much about all the other stuff, you are a wonderful parent and importantly kept working out the problems as best you could. There are too many parents who want someone to blame instead of trying to work it out sensibly. I wish some of the parents of wifes class were as open as you, one in particular dismisses her childs antics as part of his SEN and gives him no consequences for his behaviour. The result when he enters the real world is not likely to be pretty.

PasturesNew

lostinrates wrote: »

... without politics there would be no free at point of use basic education for all. ..

Free education was originally provided by the Churches - they wanted to tackle falling attendance rates and boost their pew/bum count. By providing free education, where the kids could count and read the hymn books etc, it gave them a chance to control their behaviour in general and to get bums on pews.

PasturesNew

A completely random website find, I was looking for records about a specific feral family called Rockett. http://www.rockettstgeorge.co.uk/birds-308-c.asp

Seems to be quirky housey stuff - but the link, in particular, will bring a giggle to the face of at least one NP, maybe.

Of special note is what can be bought for £49 on the 3rd row down.

lostinrates

PasturesNew wrote: »

A completely random website find, I was looking for records about a specific feral family called Rockett. http://www.rockettstgeorge.co.uk/birds-308-c.asp

Seems to be quirky housey stuff - but the link, in particular, will bring a giggle to the face of at least one NP, maybe.

Of special note is what can be bought for £49 on the 3rd row down.

You beauty.

Doozergirl

PasturesNew wrote: »

A completely random website find, I was looking for records about a specific feral family called Rockett. http://www.rockettstgeorge.co.uk/birds-308-c.asp

Seems to be quirky housey stuff - but the link, in particular, will bring a giggle to the face of at least one NP, maybe.

Of special note is what can be bought for £49 on the 3rd row down.

I love Rockett St George. You can almost always buy their wares, or similar, cheaper elsewhere.