Three thoughts on Education.
Compiled from various thoughts/postings over 16 years of teaching thus far. Sad thing is - it all still holds.
1. On Ofsted (from 2013)
We had Ofsted inspecting us this past week at work so particularly enjoyed the weekend. Every day at work last week felt twice as long. All that extra effort looking over your shoulder, making sure that at every point you were looking busy, making sure that at every point you were providing evidence and showing demonstratively things that you do anyway. Elemental thing that has always fucked up at every place I've ever worked is the breakdown of trust between management and staff - always means that where you work transforms from a nice place to be into an array of cubicles, drones housed within, tip-tap-tip-tapping their paperwork into shape, the paperwork the only shape work has anymore, the joy gone, the malcontentment growing with every keystroke. Ofsted bring such mutual contempt to a dizzying frenzy of panic and rage.
And what they insist on has little to do with encouraging thought as a teacher. It's a checklist any idiot could conform to, and bad teachers are great at conforming. Crucially though, it's Ofsted's blanket insistence on the same approach to every lesson, the same approach from every teacher, this attempt to smash everyone down to the same bland level of 'evidenced' 'provision', and the highly dubious way that evidence can be generated and checked, that irks the most.
For good teachers it's a chance to feel worried and mistrusted. I've been given graded observations by Ofsted many times, always the same grade (2), always the same mealy mouthed advice given as to how I could improve. Increase 'interactivity' (for it is a buzzword, and that's what Ofsted's rhetoric is all about) by getting students involved earlier in lessons. Actually had one inspector tell me in all earnestness that instead of offering questions out for kids to put their hands up, I should actually look into having buzzers in class so students could 'buzz in' their answers like it was a quiz show. I'd previously been unaware that Chris Tarrant was some kind of educational idol to aspire to but that's another thing Ofsted do, they teach you things you never knew before. Like a lesson in which the kids aren't DOING something within the space of two minutes is a bad lesson. Like too much 'chalk and talk' (i.e a teacher talking whilst the kids listen) is inherently damaging to a kids education. This runs so utterly counter to my deepest-held intuitive memories and thoughts about teaching I find it next to impossible to ever change the way I teach for these people. Which means I'll be a 2 forever. Fucking fine. Most of the teachers who ever affected me strongly as a child were those where you got a sense that (a) they knew what they were talking about & (b) they CARED about what they were talking about. With such teachers, it was fine if they decided to talk for a while without necessarily 'INVOLVING' you. For me it's analogous to good telly. How would David Attenborough, or Simon Schama, or Kenneth Clarke, or Bronowsky, or Meades or Robert Hughes or John Berger or AJP Taylor have managed if within two minutes they'd have to sort their audiences into groups, get them to mark their own work or create a 'mind-map' of their 'feelings'? For Ofsted, the pictures in brochures for education, those perfectly posed prospectus shots of happy smiling students 'interacting' with each other and staff in fun role-playing and group-therapy-style situations are what they want to see when they walk past and through classrooms, and the idea of a group of students simply LISTENING to what an expert has to say is utter anathema to them. Ofsted start from the defeatist perspective that kids are naturally resistant to being given knowledge, that you have to 'smuggle' learning through via the kind of 'ice-breaking' and 'peer-led' assesment & teaching techniques of management-consultancy and team building. Learning for them is always, dictatorially, an active thing, and that means ACTION, never mind that listening can be incredibly active, never mind that hearing someone who knows what they're on about go on about that thing they know about with something approaching care can actually be the most lasting memory of education, the most keenly felt learning, beyond the distribution of scissors and moodboards and bingo-markers and brainstorming. Again I see deep analogies with previous places of work, times when in desperation the voice has fundamentally altered from speaking across to a readership to speaking down, simplifying essential complexity in favour of a supposedly inclusive crayon-scrawled emptiness of content. Ofsted would actually seek to stop the danger of teaching where it occurs, would prefer 'involvement' in relativist 'discussion' to the enrapture of concrete ideas.
Although schools inspectors have always been with us, it's Ofsted's creation in 1992 that marks the real final shift in educational values away from knowledge and towards pure vocationalism. To be a teacher now, is to be little more than a cheerleader for capitalism, someone who prepares their charges for the viccisitudes of the workplace and nothing else. Anything else, apparently, is a waste of time, anything else is something kids apparently don't 'want' (curiously reminiscent of being told kids don't want writing that challenges them by various dunderheads in the media over the years, clueless underestimation all the way). Consequently, my natural revulsion for such tiny-minded notions of what teachers and students are capable of means that I have always utterly disregarded Ofsted's guideline obsessiveness about instant and constant 'interaction'. To them, I must be a bad teacher. Good. The other week, I had a lesson wherein I was going to teach a group of 17 year olds about governmental and authoritarian interference in music. I planned on dealing with a few thousand years of the history of that interference in a 90 minute session, all the way from Plato & Aristotle & Socrates through the Christian era, through the baroque/classical/romantic systems of patronage and leaving things just as we emerge into the modern era in the 20th Century. Although it's anathema to modern teaching practice I decided, given the breadth of the subject matter and the complexity of the ideas, to deliver this in an entirely un-interactive, contemporarily-scorned manner. I talked, and the students wrote down what I said. I wasn't, and am not, a total monster. Questions were frequently invited, and were answered. Answered not by peer-to-peer discussion, or online research or via whiteboards or Lanschool or Moodle but by ME, because I'm the teacher, and as a serious thinker about music for most of my life I felt my answers were good, crucially undefinitive but suggestive. The kids had alot of questions, discussion was free, only truncated by time constraints. Didn't go fully old-skool (you can't throw whiteboard rubbers at kids heads, utterly innefective in drawing blood), but by the end of the lesson, without ever organising them into groups, or pointing them towards doing 'their own research' (the lazy teachers constant recourse), they each had a fairly complete picture of ancient, medieval and renaissance ideas about music, politics, religion, the state and the relationships between those ideas. I closed the lesson by pointing them towards some places where their reading could go further, and how if they wished, they could improve what we'd built.
According to Ofsted, the kids should've hated this lesson, should've recoiled from it's old-fashioned didactic nature, should've come away having learned nothing except a bristling resentment for the subject. The newsflash you can guess runs thus: THEY FUCKING LOVED IT. Some of them even expressed a preference for more teaching to be like this. And though I would never dream of saying that EVERY lesson should be like that or that EVERY student had the same response, I equally ferociously reject Ofsted's idea that NO lesson can EVER be like that, that NO student EVER wants that. That blanket insistence on de rigeur methods stems from what I mentioned earlier, that fatal mistrust that poisons relationships between exec and those at the coal-face. It's mistrust that breeds formalistic prescriptions, it's mistrust that breeds the constant generation of ever-more preposterous waves of evidence-provision and boxes to tick (which of course, as a part-timer, I'm meant to generate in my own sweet spare time).
According to Ofsted before every lesson I should've printed out the following, and if I'm missing any single element from the following list I have failed as a teacher, failed my students and failed their criteria for getting anything approaching a good grade in any observation.
1. A lesson plan that breaks down everything that will happen in the lesson according to strict time-demarcations, my activities in each chunk of the lesson, the students activities in each chunk of the lesson, the embedding of 'equality & diversity' teaching (kind of tricky when you're teaching people about the development and invention of the MP3 say, but hohum), the differentiation between different students' abilities/problems again for each of those time slots within the lesson, a list of resources used in terms of equipment etc, targets for the lesson, targets for the next lesson, targets from the last lesson and an appraisal of how that lesson and the current lesson went. Indications throughout as to whether the language used was vocational or academic. Indications throughout of assessment method, as well as a final appraisal as to whether all objectives have been achieved.
2. A 'Scheme Of Work', i.e a detailed plan of how the entire unit/term is taught incorporating times/groups, special support needs, a week by week breakdown of curriculum covered, teachers activities, student activities, resources used, learning-outcomes covered, specific learning objectives for every week including indication as to whether these are successfully achieved. Basically all your lesson plans for an entire subject condensed into an epic document that you should ALWAYS have with you for every lesson.
3. A detailed 'Learner Profile' containing information about every student including any support needs, problems, testimony from support staff or parents, each students preferred learning style (auditory-visual-kinaesthetic etc) and any other information about the student gleaned from previously generated learner-profiles or one-on-one tutorials with the students progress tutor. This document frequently runs into dozens of pages.
So, in total then I have to create 3 documents per lesson before I can even start the lesson. In total this might total at least 20-30 pages of documentation (fuck the polar-bears, we need EVIDENCE!). For every lesson. Every single fucking lesson in the week. For me, that's 250 different kids spread between a dozen different groups from 9-5.30 five days a week. A lesson plan, scheme of work & learner profile for every single one of those 5 lessons a day, every single day. I should create 75 documents a week just to prove I'm a teacher, and this is before any actual preparation for the teaching I'm doing in the lesson. Because hey, newsflash. In three stages (Ofsted, like all exec, love their numbered bullet-points).
1. A good teacher has a lesson plan IN THEIR HEAD before even daring to set foot in a classroom because they know that beyond Ofsted, kids can sniff disorganisation a mile off and will instantaneously translate that into a total lack of respect for your floundering ass.
2. A good teacher NEVER EVER FUCKING REFERS to a scheme of work because they know that criteria/learning outcomes are usually written by people with no experience in the field they're supposedly expert in, and like all criteria, they're their to be worked around rather than with. I know of no teacher who has actually found a Scheme Of Work to be useful in their teaching, only a GIGANTIC PAIN IN THE ARSE to create, and always for the purposes of box-tickers and checkers higher up the managerial-chain.
3. A good teacher KNOWS THEIR STUDENTS inside and out and doesn't need a potentially dangerous & essentially private document like a learner profile to be toted with them class-to-class to inform them of which students need care & consideration.
For bad teachers of course, Ofsted is a chance to cosmetically slap on a good lesson for once and get a totally unfair appraisal. I recall a teacher in my dept. who was appalling, hated by students and other staff, so inept that he actually abandoned a lesson once because he 'couldn't find a hard surface to fill out my register on'. Every time he got tipped the wink that Ofsted were coming he'd suddenly produce a great lesson, then smugly coast on that rating for the rest of his entirely lazy-assed year of unprofessional duty-dereliction.
Either way, we all get tarred with a brush only developed through minimal contact with teachers and students. A good teacher, knowing Ofsted are coming a-knocking should be able to knock up the necessary documentation, hold their noses and get through it. But of course, none of your pannicced artifice, the slapped on smile and suddenly-created documentary-evidence matters if you don't get seen, and if other teachers do badly, the institution as a whole, even if you never see hide nor hair of the inspectors themselves, will be damned. Meaning Ofsted will be back within the year, a year in which there'll be ever more hoops to jump through, ever-more distractions from the real business of teaching and learning.
I hear ours went badly. I'm not surprised. Fundamental flaw in the inspection process is that we are warned. Gives enough time for a climate of fear to be created, and for everyone to fall into the same step, give the same tacit approval to Ofsted's maneouvres of data-crunching, their forensic compiling of defects in the paper-trail. I sincerely hope next time Ofsted turn up at college they DON'T give a warning, just turn up on a Monday morning and don't immediately go into 4hrs of meetings with management but just stride into lessons straight away. I would actually cherish the opportunity to explain to inspectors at length why I HAVEN'T got the documents they desire i.e cos I'm a fucking teacher & I'm here to teach. I would love to waft away their pointless justifications of their pointless roles, make them realise that I apprehend them purely as lubricators of Thatcherite league-table-obsessed educational competetiveness via all this box-ticking bullshit, box-ticking that isn't just a totally disconnected-with-realities-of-teaching exercise in timewasting but is actually utterly inimical to my deepest held beliefs about teaching and what kids need and care about. Ofsted are all, ex-teachers or not (and many Ofsted inspectors, like me, have no teaching qualifications), exec, and consequently have forgot, or never had a clue in the first place, what makes a good lesson, a good teacher, a good institution, a good place to learn.
It's no accident that so many Ofsted staff sell-by-moonlight their services to colleges that are due inspections, consultations about how to achieve the best outcomes, the 'sharing of good practice' to ensure the right numbers get crunched. It's no accident that the real solution, in direct contrast to Ofsted's baffling labarynthine attempts to confuse every issue, is a simple one.
Ofsted is founded on NOT trusting people to do their job. Fuck that. Trust YOUR instincts about the school, the teachers, and whether it's a good place for your kid to go. You don't need checklists, you don't need hours of meeting with slimy management-bods, and you certainly don't need to judge whether the institution itself can work itself into a sufficiently frenzied aura of panic to necessitate the creation of enough paperwork to fell a rainforest.
Parents, teachers, students: ignore Ofsted.
Ignore their findings.
Ignore the league-tables created.
Ignore the Blairite headmasters keen for Academy status.
Ignore the "roadmaps to progress", the recommendations, the 'plans put in place to achieve compliance to' a better rating, just as you should ignore the 'triumphant outcomes'. They are simply documents of fear, loathing, mistrust and lies. If you have a kid in the school, ask the kid (something Ofsted do painfully little of) and trust what they say. If they're not happy, go see your school, give 'em hell, see what can be done. Fight your own fights. Trust in yourself to win.
Trust, y'see, all important and all but forgotten by Ofsted and their believers. Fucking up standards. Ruining lives.
2. On Tory Education Policy and the Ebaac, 2014.
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. FOR FEAR HAS ME LYING AS WELL
An emotionally perceptive student said to me late this week. 'You hate us, don't you?' I was flustered. Nailed me. I need a weekend to recharge, prepare. Teaching, to a large extent is about confidence and preparation creates confidence. Preparation impossible with teachers workloads at the moment. Gone from a time when you'd look forward to the holidays to looking forward to the weekend to looking forward to the end of the goddamned day. I'm worried that my frustration with the job is filtering through to students. Who deserve that ire the least. Thinking, with the morning sickness, the pit of fear the stomach hasn't experienced since games/P.E days at school, why I'm still doing this. A feeling amped up massively when I get home (tearing off the lanyard that annoints me with dread every time I put it on) and read the latest comments from our education secretary.
Here's what Nicky Morgan said, as reported in The Stage.
"Many young people are making choices aged 15 which will hold them back for the rest of their lives". Lovely. I have yet to be told a single fucking reason why this shithead is our education secretary, just as I was never aware of a single fucking reason why the previous shithead (Gove) was our education secretary. The thinking seems to be purely about antagonising teachers. Almost immediately anyone who's ever worked in a creative field was apoplectic. In making these comments during an event intended to promote the teaching and learning of core subjects like maths and science Morgan might be forgiven for thinking she was playing to the crowd she was talking to, rather than thinking about everyone who'd hear about it, a little bit of 'carelessness'. I don't think it's carelessness at all. It's the only thing someone like her could say. Anything else would be true hypocrisy. Her statements are entirely revealing of what the Tories would reduce education to. A purely vocationally-minded career-preparing exercise with no inherent value in itself, and with arts/humanities subjects preserved purely as things the middle and upper classes can engage in while the rest of the riff-raff learn something immediately employable. Perpetuates the idea not only that the arts don't pay, but that the arts are something you have to pay to be involved in, a hobby to indulge, never a way to make a living. Know your place. And stay there. And don't you dare investigate any knowledge that might suggest the 'harsh realities of the marketplace' might be a lie. By the time I'd finished reading, I was interrupted by my eldest daughter coming home. In a mood. What's new, she's a teenager. But a parent can tell when a kid's holding something in.
Went upstairs, asked some questions. Floods of tears. Sobbing. Because of school, because of the pressure she's under, because this is her GCSE year and her teachers are doing nothing but getting on the kids backs about achieving. These incessant mind-games are nothing new, they're the natural result of what happens when a teacher sees their job as delivering statistics, good figures, making sure percentage achievement rates don't slip, ever mindful that the stats, not the student's experience, is ultimately what matters to their managers. A target-related pressure kids are being absolutely brutalised under at the moment. Don't know a parent of a teenager who hasn't been astonished at the levels of stress kids are suffering about exams. And all that's being blared at them is career career career career, from their teachers all the way up to the education secretary. I gave her a hug, tried to give her a sense of perspective, the 'all you can do is try your best' platitudes all parents have to say when they see their kids put in pain by the panic in education, the twitchy paranoia of the Ofsteded and surveilled and threatened. The panic that's going on across the board in social and public services in the UK because public good has been forgotten in the name of increased efficiency and customer service. Pile the kids in, teach them cheap, education is now purely the creation of a trail of evidence, spooked by those eyes over the shoulder, the indoctrination of corporate truth (i.e corporate lies) that are all that management knows (because in the main now, they only come from the private sector) percolating down to the consciousness of people who previously thought that caring about kids, and trying your best, was enough. It's not enough now. As a teacher, your sole job is to prepare kids for employment, anything else is time wasting and will get you a disciplinary. A joy in learning of itself? How is that going to increase your ability to become a mortgage-slave? Knowledge that isn't 'useful to business'? That's not knowledge, that's pointless frippery. It's not the 70s anymore hippy. You are here to train children to work. Absolutely nothing else matters.
The most common thing I've heard from teachers in the past year is dreams - of leaving, of walking away and oh how sweet that that flipped finger to the boss would be. And jokes - of being replaced by robots, of jacking it in and stacking shelves and being happy and not taking so much anguish home every night. These reveries punctuate the drudge, the horror. Teaching itself is the most enjoyable part of the day. It's a blessed relief from all the other shit you have to do to be allowed into that classroom, to keep the endless hovering boxtickers and number-crunchers off your back. But that classroom's not really yours. Don't con yourself. Observations will have knocked that idealism out of you. It's your job to knock the idealism out of kids and make them face up to reality. They must work, and work hard and focus on becoming appealing to business, a willing plaything of industry, as happy and fulfilled and tied to a role as all adults are in modern Britain. And from 12 onwards they must choose options about their future. They must decide how they're going to fit in, earn, settle into the pattern of anxiety and tranquilisation that is modern life. So my daughter's crying because of 'pressure'? Man up. Or starve to death. These are the options.
People like Morgan shouldn't be allowed to despoil youth like this. The next day we have a Union meeting. College proposes we take a cut in holidays, no remission for planning/organising, make sick pay way more 'discretionary' and forfeit most of our pay progression. We all of course voted yay in rejecting it, but even in the notably increased militancy there was a trace of doom, a sense not of securing our futures in teaching but of ensuring we battle them every step of the way until we find a way out, or they find a way to force us out. Morgan's comments are indicative of alot, but perhaps scarier than that they're prophetic. The Tories are waiting for the greenlight of re-election to basically destroy whole swathes of British education, farm it out to private enterprise (whose management class have already colonised state institutions at management level). In five years 50% of FE courses will be delivered online and kids will be so scared they'll want nothing but apprenticeships. The only non-apprenticeship courses left in twenty years will be recruiting arms of the political and media class - i.e PPE at Oxbridge, that's yr lot. I was encouraged, cos I was ok at English, to try and get into Oxford. I failed massively, mind too full and disordered. No-one made me think it was the end. No-one made me worry about it before or afterwards. When I tell my students that they have their whole lives to get on the gravy-train, to be saddled with responsibilities of providing for a family and that when they're young they should explore their own imaginations they hear it with increasing surprise. No-one in their lives is asking them - do they want to look back at their twenties and be able to point at a balance sheet and say 'look how much debt I paid off'? I, like many people who've worked in the 'creative sector' (i.e dicking around doing what you want) am in that blissful state of being able to look back at my twenties and not really remember much of it because I was having too good a time. Lots of misery as well but at least it was on my own terms and I can look back and think, I gave what I love and care about my best shot. Kids need to have their perspectives on the world and their possibilities in it WIDENED, not narrowed down at a heartbreakingly early age to how they're going to survive, get ahead, be 'competetive'. For fucking shame Mrs Morgan, for fucking shame.
Crucially, it's that whole deeper idea here that Morgan perpetuates that's dangerous - that art and science can't learn from each other, aren't already massively enmeshed, aren't BOTH creative acts. Suggests just how little Morgan, and her cohorts, understand about both. Tremendously irresponsible and insensitive for an education secretary to basically be saying to tons of kids - hey, you're not good at maths/science? You're fucked. Appalling thing to say, to science kids and arts kids. I wonder also if she's actually spoken to any maths/science graduates recently? If she thinks they're all doing jobs closely related to what they studied or specialised in she's fucking deluded, they're in the same grim boat as most school-leavers and graduates alike. Working slave labour for slave wages. Suits the Tories to divide us all. Much as they have made the working poor hate the workless poor, the native hate the auslander, they want to place science at odds with art, force upon all of us categories of acceptability whereby arts disciplines can be portrayed as mickey-mouse undisciplined navel-gazing wasteful passes to a life of unemployability, whereas maths/science pursuits can ONLY be engaged in in order to improve your future income prospects. Utterly ignores the way that the creative arts work. I worked for 20 odd years in a creative role and was never asked my qualifications. Was about confidence and ability, not bits of paper. Also utterly denigrates and ignores the wide complexity of reasons why people study maths and science. Never met a mathematician whose aesthetic sense wasn't just as important in what they did as anything else, never met a scientist or mathematician who didn't have deep utterly unfinancial reasons of curiosity and wonder and enjoyment behind what they decided to study. The likes of Morgan, Cameron, could never understand that. And we should all make it plain that their attempts to divide us between the can-dos and the cant-be-arsed isn't fooling anyone. They would seek to reduce every single mental endeavour in life down to that which can be proved fiscally productive and profitable. That's as dangerous to science as it is to art, and reveals a thickheaded obliviousness to the purpose and possibilities of life that's staggering. Only a cabinet composed of corporate lawyers, business bullies and PR men could endorse such an attitude. Unfortunately that's exactly what we've got.
I'm sure Morgan worked hard at her five-grand a term private school and in her pre-MP job in corporate law that so entitles and enables her to commandeer the education of our nation, be the frontperson of its ongoing discharge into the hands of business. But any parent knows, and any teacher knows, what kids need is balance. Yes they should be encouraged to do well at school. They also need to know that failure is not the end. They also need to know that life is long, they are young, and all kinds of odd things can happen. They need to know that life is not as simple as feeding qualifications into a machine that will then pay you. We haven't got credit-scored chips and pins in our necks yet. In Morgan's comments, in this government's inability to see the point in anything beyond the ceaseless accumulation of wealth for a privileged elite you hear a vision of life that's horrific, inaccurate, no kind of life any of us would want to be part of. It's the Tory vision of the future and I suspect in my most pessimistic days and nights it will all become true. But if my job as a teacher is dependent on my ability to present that mercenary future as the only option then I want out. If I'm meant to tell kids that the future will be a vital'n'vibrant meritocracy that kids should want to be part of, that kids should workuntil they sob with the stress to be part of, then I'd rather leave that game to the cowed and desperate, and once they're fired the glassy-eyed Academy/Freeschool evangelists the Torys would like to be dealing with. Morgan's suggestion that kids should strictly limit their ambitions and dreams down to that which will enable them to become another ground out gear in the machine is an evil lie no teacher wants to be part of. Until I am forced out of my job I will make it my business to tell every kid I teach that the government are lying to them but crucially, that life is too wonderful to plan for. You should believe that when you're young. One day you'll grow up and realise it.
3. Occassioned by ‘World Teachers Day’, 2018
#WorldTeachersDay has me reminiscing - I do remember English teachers having a massive effect on me. One lovely very auld fella I'll never forget asking me what I had in my bag one day. It was a record - New York Dolls' 'Too Much Too Soon'. He perused the sleeve and said 'Yes, this explains so much'. When I won the only thing I ever won (book tokens for an English prize) he wanted to see what I'd bought with them. Hubert Selby's 'The Room' + Raymond Carver's 'Complete Short Stories'. He had a scan of a page of the Room and his eyebrows were a ballet.
Despite modern teaching's desire to make everything 'fun', 'interactive' and 'participatory' the teachers who had the biggest impact on me simply talked, occassionally leading discussion, about what they cared and knew about. Nothing beats an expert talking about their area of expertise.What's anathema in teaching at the mo is "too much 'chalk-and-talk'". Ignoring the fact that someone who loves literature talking about literature can be utterly enthralling, mind-expanding and revelatory. I'll never forget a Latin/Greek/Classics teacher giving a real tearaway mate of mine a good mark purely cos he'd drawn, at the top of his work about the Trojan War, a doodle of an apple flying one way and a nuclear warhead going the other. This was a v.v oldschool guy who seemed to be from a previous century (as did most of my teachers) but he could spot when a kid understood something, no matter how chaotic the expression. Really stuck with me that moment.
Crucially, all the great teachers I ever had didn't tell me what to think. They just suggested ways I could interpret. In a world of 'teaching British Values' I miss the freedom in pedagogy of those teachers, and the freedom we as kids, felt being taught by them. That change - from teachers who spun you out to learn more, to teachers shackled to specs, outcomes and league tables is totally analagous to the death of the music press. From launchpads for readers' further reconnaissance to terrified cravenness to publishers, a lack of confidence, an ever-anxious servility to the readership that did no-one, readers or writers any favours.
As with everything - once trust goes, it can't be rebuilt. I think this is what's fundamental to our current malaise in all kinds of areas. There's no trust anymore. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad schools get inspected. And there's alot of horrible teachers I remember. But it's increasingly difficult to put YOURSELF across in teaching which is the whole key.