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.