Frank Chalk, who works in a “sink school” (see below) has been arguing on the radio with a teacher from a nice school.

During our discussion, I started to give an example of a pupil misbehaving in class and how easy it is for a single disruptive child to utterly destroy your lesson. The other teacher replied with genuine puzzlement:

‘Well I’d just tell him to stop and he would’

I think he was serious and maybe it is as simple as that in his school. I pointed out that in my dump, the child wouldn’t even bother to aknowledge that you had said anything, but I started to get that age old feeling once again, that there is such a huge gap in the public’s (and many teachers’) perception of what it’s really like trying to teach in a sink school and just how bad some of our customers can be.

Our state education system depends for its effectiveness on the chain of command-and-control issuing commands which are actually obeyed and which actually do control.  It’s a Prussianised pyramid of power, and the people running it have to be willing to get Prussian from time to time, or it can’t work.  Yet the people who preside over this system from London are reluctant to admit that the system they command involves much in the way of commands being given, other than by them to teachers.  God forbid that the teachers themselves should command.  No, they must help, enable, inspire, communicate, facilitate, anything except actually give orders to children, and insist that they be obeyed.  In nice schools, this myopia does no huge damage.  In schools like the one Frank Chalk works in, it is suicidal.

As it happens I share the distaste for Prussianism that the commanders of our state education system display, with regard to teachers Prussianising their pupils, and when it comes to politicians piling initiative after initiative upon the teachers.  But I’m not involved in running the state education.  I help out in a small school independent of the state system, and our discipline system is the same as it is in rest of the civilised world, that is, in all the bits of the world that are civilised.  Obey the rules or leave.  Okay, you may have to have those rules explained to you a couple of times, but if that’s happened and still you break them, then you must leave and you can’t come back.  There’s plenty more who want in, who are prepared to behave.  All the parents are on our side, and pay something.  Not much, but something.  Simple really.

That radio discussion was sparked by the Government’s ongoing campaign to get “high flyers” into state education.  But as Frank Chalk says, the working conditions are the problem.  No matter how high these high flyers may have flown in other skies, in this one, they are liable to come down to earth with a bump.

See in particular: the comments.  Most enlightening.

And see also what FC has to say about the NUT’s proposed one day teachers strike.