A former language teacher explains why his idealism turned to disillusion as he learned how today’s school system works
“I wanted to become a language teacher because I love languages and enjoy teaching. But after teaching in the UK for a year I decided to go abroad instead and, frankly, I would not want to come back. The British education system is riddled with flaws, brought about by successive governments enacting relentless reforms without the patience to wait and see what actually works.
There are problems in the way we train our teachers, the means by which we measure success, and how we scrutinise schools.
In the course of my PGCE, the postgraduate teaching qualification, I spent 12 weeks at university and 24 in schools. The university days were intended to help us to teach using a variety of pedagogical methods, but it felt like our lecturers didn’t have enough material and that we were just treading water, ticking off the days.
Curiously, none of the people studying to become language teachers received any training specific to their language. We all attended the same lectures on how to teach languages, whether we were looking to teach French, Chinese, Russian or Spanish. These are vastly different languages and require quite different styles of teaching; lumping all of them together seemed nonsensical.
The same attitude seemed to prevail on some of the school placements: I know language teacher students who were occasionally asked to teach a language they had never learnt. It is assumed that they only need a very basic understanding of the language for their lesson, because they’re teaching at such a modest level. But when a child asks you a question and you can’t answer it, your authority suffers.
I didn’t leave my PGCE course feeling as though I had received a year’s training: the whole course could have easily been slimmed down to a couple of months at a school.
My disillusionment deepened when I started my first job as a trainee teacher at an urban secondary school, and realised the huge flaws in our system for predicting children’s grades and assessing teachers’ skills.
At my school, if a pupil achieved a level 4 in his SATs in year 6 – taken when pupils are around 11 years old – then the guidelines insisted that they should be predicted a C or above for every GCSE. However, the SATs only involve maths and English, whereas GCSEs involve a wide variety of subjects, including languages. This skewed forecasting meant that I – the only language teacher in the school – was expected to ensure that kids who’d done well in English and maths did equally well in languages; if I didn’t, it would look like their performance was deteriorating in my class. But just because a child gets good grades in maths and English, that doesn’t mean they have a talent for foreign languages.
What’s more, schools are put in league tables based on their pupils’ GCSE grades. But the way the tables work means schools with very high-achieving pupils are categorised along with ones where the majority attain Cs. So in weaker schools, more resources are focused on children who are likely to get Ds, rather than on pushing the brighter ones to achieve their very best. All schools needs to worry about is achieving as many Cs as possible.
You may take comfort in Ofsted, which checks up on our schools and assesses their effectiveness. But the pressure on schools to do well at Ofsted inspections is so high that they are tempted to cheat – and because inspections are announced three days in advance, there is ample opportunity to do so. I’ve heard reports of head teachers sending all the naughty kids on trips when an inspection is due, and even giving them money to stay at home.
When my school was observed, teachers retaught pupils lessons they’d already given, so it looked like students understood their subjects well. The kids had been warned beforehand not to say anything. Our school received a ‘good’ Ofsted rating, which I don’t think it deserved.
Teachers should not only be assessed on their pupils’ performance and grades, but also on how well they help children learn, how they conduct their lessons, and how they help their students to become well-rounded people.
Teachers’ morale and the quality of teaching won’t increase if proposed changes like slashing lesson-planning and marking time, or tough reforms to pensions, are implemented. On the contrary, these changes will discourage people from taking up teaching and ruin the enthusiasm of an already over-stretched workforce.
If we want to achieve any kind of improvement, central government needs to give more consideration to teachers’ views and listen to what they say about what works and what doesn’t. Properly measuring the success of education policies means not endlessly fiddling with the system, and leaving sufficient time to assess whether a policy is working or not before trying something else.”