Respect for Teachers, and Other Basic Requirements of an Education Secretary

Nicky Morgan has no respect for teachers. As the Education Secretary, and thus the governmental representative of teachers, she should be working with them not against them.

I say that she is (or should be) the governmental representative of teachers, because it is teachers who know what is best for the education of the country's children. It is teachers who spend their lives trying to make these young humans into valuable grown ups. It is teachers who see the daily struggle of the individuals, and lament the lack of time and resources for sports, computing and other subjects.

Teachers care about the education of children. That is why they are in the job. There is no other reason to be a teacher: the working hours are insane, the pay is poor and even the holiday is frankly not worth the sacrifice. If Nicky Morgan cared about the education of children and not just about league tables, then she would listen to teachers and work with them instead of against them. Respect for teachers should be a basic requirement of our Education Secretary, and Morgan's latest plans - for bringing schools into special measures if they do not see a 100% pass rate in literacy and numeracy tests - shows a complete lack of respect for the hard work that teachers are already doing.

Morgan needs to recognise that the teacher workload is already unmanageable, and understand that teachers are already putting every effort into making sure that no child falls behind. Children who struggle with literacy and numeracy are already given extra help by teachers, but the picture that our education secretary sees seems to be one of teachers who don't care if some children can't read or do mental arithmetic by the time they leave school.

The average primary school teacher works over 59 hours a week. To set new targets without extra funding or support is to say that teachers are not working hard enough. Morgan is implying that innumeracy and illiteracy levels are down to teacher failure, and ignoring the unique circumstances of individual pupils. It is not teachers who are failing children, it is the government that is failing teachers.

Teachers are willing to make huge personal sacrifices for children's education. How much are we prepared to let them sacrifice? At what point does their sacrifice become enough that it is actually detrimental to education rather than furthering it?

Teachers who are stressed with test results and bureaucracy will inevitably pass some of this stress onto their pupils. They will not have the energy to prepare fun and engaging lessons, teaching children the joy of learning and encouraging individual strengths. The government is promoting robotic fact learning: this is not education.

Requiring a 100% pass rate is not "ambitious" (unapologetically or otherwise), it is ridiculous. To put the success of the school and the jobs of head teachers onto the shoulders of their most challenged pupils on test day is unfair on everyone involved.

Teaching to the test does not sufficiently educate children. Grading a teacher's success by test results is as harmful as determining a child's worth by test results alone. MPs should be working with teachers and listening to them to understand the issues that need to be addressed in schools. We need to start seeing the bigger picture and redetermine where our priorities lie.

There is More to Education

Education is everything. If you're racist, or homophobic, it's because you are uneducated in what it means to be different. If you shout at someone in the street because they got in your way, it's likely that you were never sufficiently educated on appropriate anger management and resolution. If you are able to work, but choose to stay at home and live on benefits, then education has failed you - regardless of what grades you got in school.

Education is so much more than grammar and times tables.

Education Secretary Nicky Morgan has just announced a "war on illiteracy and innumeracy" and plans to move England up the league tables by punishing any school that does not have a 100% pass rate on English and maths tests in 10 and 11 year olds. Any school that does not have a 100% pass rate two years in a row will be considered a school in need of serious help, and professionals will be brought in from other schools to show them how it's done.

Firstly, her use of the word "war" is accurate. In a war, there are casualties. In a war, there are no real winners. In this war, the casualties will be children across the country.

The academically bright children, who mastered spelling, grammar and arithmetic early on, will find that they are not able to be furthered, because once they have reached the appropriate level they are no longer priority, and teachers' limited resources have to be used elsewhere.

The academically challenged, who struggle with English and maths, are carrying the school on their shoulders: if just one of them doesn't pass their literacy or their numeracy test, the whole school and every teacher in it is considered to have failed. That child has failed the whole school by being bad at spelling.

This pressure - on the teachers and the pupils - is insane. And how important is it, really? Some of the most successful people I know, company directors earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, don't know the difference between 'affect' and 'effect'. They have illegible handwriting, they write 'could of' instead of 'could have'. It turns out, you can be hugely successful and still not know 12x7 without using a calculator or spreadsheet. Why are we letting these children think they have failed?

In our capitalist society, the richest and freest people are the entrepreneurs. The lateral thinkers. The people with creativity and ambition. If we are teaching our children that the most important things for their self-worth are their literacy and numeracy levels, we are lying to them and depriving them. We are not educating our children in the important things in life. How to play. How to recognise and believe in your own abilities. How to recognise the values of others.

Defining the success of English schools by their ranking in league tables is absurd. We should be defining the success of English schools by the calibre of human being that comes out of them. If we want our country to prosper, we need our children to learn creative thinking, ambition, and the joy of learning, so that they find their passion and continue learning on their own after school is done. We need our children to learn acceptance of others, to understand that being different does not mean being less valuable.

Don't get me wrong: literacy and numeracy are vital, and children should absolutely be taught spelling, grammar and punctuation, as well as arithmetic. The children who are naturally talented in these subjects should be pushed further, and those who struggle should have all possible help and support to get them to an acceptable level for life. But we should not be focussing solely on English and maths at the expense of a holistic education. A child who has a C in English and maths but no other skills is going to be a less successful adult than the child who never uses commas and misspells 'definitely' but is excellent at analytical thinking. Learning by rote is not education.