Page 45

Reader's rant

Give them time

I am increasingly dismayed by the way students are not given time to think. And they are not given time because their teachers are under constant pressure to be ‘outstanding’. And to complicate matters, those outstanding goal-posts keep moving, so what we are aiming for gets narrower.

I was quite a good English teacher once. I worked hard to create interesting lessons, knew my national curriculum, found creative ways to engage the students with some of the less accessible texts, and marked books regularly with thoughtful comments designed to encourage and challenge. My classroom was, and still is, a creative place where children flourish.

Yet now in our ‘learning communities’ (a meeting that wasn’t even on the calendar five years ago) we are bombarded by bewildering activities and encouraged to teach with them. There is an ‘activity of the week’ on our electronic noticeboard when we log on in the morning. The tri-part lesson is out of favour; now nothing short of ten stages seems good enough.

I will forgive my learned colleagues, as they read this, for thinking it is being written by a Luddite marching

towards retirement. I am a head of department in my thirties, credited with armfuls of innovative practice in recent years. But I dread to think about how some of my colleagues in their 50s and 60s, who have been teaching for more than double the length of time I have, feel about this pressure to perform in a way that can be catalogued as consistently outstanding.

My subject is English – an immense collection of skills, embedded in content so vast we can barely scratch the surface across KS3 and KS4, seeking to expose students to as wide a variety of texts and ideas as possible to give them a flavour of our culture and literary heritage.

The skills are taught and revisited year after year. A glance at the primary curriculum might suggest students have learnt all they need to know about, say, punctuation, by the end of key stage 2; a glance at a year 10 exercise book will reveal that is not the case. Progress is slow, goes round in circles. But then it is punctuated by joyous moments of epiphany. What are the chances of my Ofsted inspector witnessing one of those? About zero, because I wouldn’t dare allow the time or space in a lesson for that to happen.

But the fact is that thinking, and writing, take time. Let’s not be too frightened to give it.

Name and address withheld

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