All Change!

"In education, it is my experience that those lessons which we learn from teachers who are not just good, but who also show affection for the student go deep into our minds. Lessons from other sorts of teachers may not. Although you may be compelled to study and may fear the teacher, the lessons may not sink in. Much depends on the affection from the teacher. " 14th Dalai Lama

It seems that almost every other day there is a new headline about teachers, schools and teaching. From KPIs to Turkey Twizzlers, there is always something under discussion and the words reform, revamp and revise are becoming part of the vocabulary of education. 

There has been a lot of discussion around teacher recruitment in England and in Wales. This week the headlines tell us that Wales has a teacher recruitment problem and that a third of teacher training places in Wales are unfilled. 

The reasons for this shortage in Wales may be obvious - Estyn's recent damning report on ITT providers in Wales, teacher workload issues that have dominated the headlines of late and the current and ongoing curriculum and assessment changes that the profession is being subjected to. Perhaps teaching in Wales isn't attractive, perhaps it is anything but! Perhaps we don't attract the right 'caliber' of graduates into the profession, perhaps we don't train those who do enter well enough. Perhaps we don't support teachers enough once they are in the profession. All of these are sure to be factors but they are also all things that we don't do or are missing. Perhaps a better way to look at this is not to ask what we don't do and why teachers don't stay in the profession but to look at what we do well and what does keep our best teachers in the classroom and then try to cultivate more of this rather than trying to incentivise change. 

This is a topic that came up in my own staff room today - what keeps you in the classroom? What keeps you in the profession? The answer - investment. Rarely are we invested in the specifications we teacher, the sticks we're measured with or the systems that bind us, but what the best teachers; the ones that stay, the ones that support others into the profession, do is care. They care about the pupils they teach and the purpose they serve. This depth of investment does not have a degree classification beside it and it is not bought by a 'golden hello', it lives in the minds and hearts of teachers and it is cultivated by schools. A school that truly cares about its staff and seeks to give them autonomy as well as support, gives teachers the opportunity to be creative, to take responsibility (not just accountability) and ownership will foster good teachers who teach with compassion, affection and conviction, and these are the teachers that the profession needs, these are the teachers who will not leave is wanting. And so, although we need change, and the New Deal -if it lives up to its promises and aims - will go a long way to providing that change, we also need to look at what we need to make more of: passionate and invested teachers.  

The Best School Leaders Look Down

The thing that both constricts and preserves humanity is the limits of the human imagination. The human imagination cannot perceive or create that which does not exist; it’s beyond its scope and capability. We can only build upon that which we already have, and use our intelligence to react to evolutionary threats and extinction. We have to have a problem before we can fashion a solution. We cannot eradicate illness and disease not because we do not have the resources or the intelligence but because we can’t imagine that which we will need to eradicate.

In education we cannot imagine that which will happen in the future, how children will evolve, how learning will grow, what the workplace will look like. We talk about creating learners, thinkers, leaders of tomorrow, but by the time tomorrow is here those same leaders will belong to yesterday. We may have many powers but we cannot imagine a future we have not seen! However, what we can do is create the ‘now’. We can be aware of the education around us, of learning, of governmental developments, and this will place us at the forefront of tackling what others have uncovered. However, there exists in good leadership teams and good school leaders the power to innovate by being brave enough to live in the now.

There is a vast landscape of undulating rock before us, it’s incomprehensibly big and all schools and their leaders are carving through the field of rock; all taking different routes, making different decisions and laying tracks as they go. Some go back on themselves, some do the worst thing of all in standing stationary, waiting to follow another’s path. And then there are the schools that see the unchartered, uncut rock as possibility and have the bravery, belief and determination to carve through it; creating their own direction. There are some paths they have to cut, some track they have to lay, but they see the expanse of rock around them waiting to be cut and reveal new destinations. The rock will never be depleted, there is no final destination, no out, no edge, because education is eternal, but in each generation there’s the possibility of exploration.

There’s track behind us and there will be track after us but right now there’s the opportunity to cut our own path and lay our own track, knowing that we are a part of now.