Secret Teacher: Our students are the real victims of Gove's reforms
Erratic overnight policy changes, vanishing classroom support, colleagues breaking down in tears, ridiculous grade projections: all part of the teacher's lot. But now the pressure is evident among a new group of sitting targets.
The students themselves.
There's Charlotte, for instance. A well-motivated, hard-working A-grade student who is now the subject of concerned emails being sent round by her head of year, warning subject teachers to tread lightly because she is becoming increasingly anxious....
In a recent surreal conversation with Ben, one of my year 11s, I felt like a Tokyo commuter, being shoved in the kidneys by an enormous oshiya. I wanted to get off the train, to say don't worry about these silly targets, but I couldn't. Ben had gained a C for a recent piece of coursework, an achievement he and his parents were highly pleased with. But I found myself in the position of having to tell him that school policy dictated that he had to retake it – because his target grade was a B. He couldn't quite believe what he was hearing, and neither could I. We had already moved on to the next piece of language coursework, he was having to prepare for the literature exam in his own time because we couldn't fit the poems into lesson time, as well as to revise for a forthcoming language mock – and now he was being asked to redo a perfectly good piece of coursework, basically for the data crunchers in senior leadership team. It's all very well to have higher aspirations, but to have them hijacked by Ofsted-phobic managers is lunacy....
(Much more at link)
http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/nov/09/student-victims-gove-reforms
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