EXAM NERVES?
| One of the messages th at careers teachers are hammering home to their pupils these days is | ||
| that there is no such thing as a job for life. In future , they explain, working people must be ready | ||
| to adapt themselves to rapidly-changing technology and , as their skills are outdated, to tolerate | ||
| periods of unemployment. | ||
| 5 | Yet teaching itself is different. It always has been: for generations, working-c1ass parents | |
| have encouraged their brighter children to enter teaching precisely because it offers the | ||
| security that their families have never known. This is why proposals by Sir Keith Joseph, the | ||
| Education Secretary, for regular assessments of teachers' performance create such horror in the | ||
| profession. | ||
| 10 | The trouble is that schools have always lacked any management structure that could control | |
| quality. Below the head in primary schools and below a few deputies in large comprehensives, | ||
| classroom teaching remains the major component in even the most senior teachers' work. At | ||
| present, there is no adequate mechanism for ensuring that teachers perform the most basic | ||
| tasks, such as marking children's work. Even the requirement to be sober during lessons is not | ||
| 15 | 15 easily enforced : it took one comprehensive more than two years to dismiss a teacher whose | |
| speech was noticeably slurred every afternoon. • | ||
| A simple employment contract could enable employers to root out the grossly and wilfully | ||
| incompetent. And the vast majority of teachers would welcome it. Sir Keith and the employers, | ||
| however, are proposing something that goes much further. They have proposed annual reports | ||
| 20 | on teachers on lines that are familiar in such diverse organizations as banks, the civil service | |
| and the BBC. Teachers who got bad reports would lose their annual increments. | ||
| Most other organizations have c1ear bench-marks. A sales manager, for example, requires his | ||
| sales force to meet their targets; a newspaper editor wants coherent, readabIe , accurate copy, | ||
| delivered on time. Teachers are expected to achieve a variety of objectives and cannot agree | ||
| 25 | among themselves on their respectiv e importance. The employers suggest assessing them not | |
| only on preparation and conduct of lessons but also on their contribution to pupils' 'social and | ||
| personal development', the advice th ey offer to parents, and their 'awareness of the school's | ||
| place in the community', which , we must assume , means something more than finding their way | ||
| there in the morning. | ||
| 30 | And how is performance on these criteria to be assessed? Is an English teacher, say, to be | |
| judged on the children's blank verse or on their formal grammar? Can you compare the | ||
| teacher taking the top stream first-year on a sunny Monday morning with the one assessed on | ||
| a bottom stream third-year lesson on a wet, windy Friday afternoon? The profession desperately | ||
| needs some system in which work is annually reviewed, and weaknesses frankly discussed. | ||
| 35 | But an appraisal system needs time to establish itself so th at the problems can be ironed out. | |
| By trying to loek it into the pay structure from the outset, Sir Keith Joseph jeopardizes its | ||
| introduetion. More seriously, he appears to be threatening the majority of the profession and | ||
| thus losing its support for an attack on the incompetent minority. |