I can imagine you didn't have much room to be flexible though Rum. Late 80s the unions were in their last throes post Thatcher's reforms, and Education secretary Kenneth Baker (now Baron Baker of Dorking) during the mid 80s set a high bar when it cames to what is a mainstay of the political discourse nowadays - running the public services down while making sure that those who were obliged to operate them are blamed for all the short-comings. Baker was the minister who invented the 'inset day', where schools would be closed to pupils once a term while the teachers were schooled in the system (you probably remember that to start with they weren't called 'inset' days, they were called 'Baker days'). It was Kenneth Clarke -- whom history has been kind enough to to now be seen as that rarest of birds, a 'good Tory' -- who took up Baker's baton, thus kickstarting the never-ending cycle of the government telling everyone how shit health or education etc are, how the teachers or nurses were opposed to reform on ideological grounds because 'unions', and of how they are going come in like a storm and sort it out by crikey afternoon.
I think the problem with the current state of education is two fold:
1. Philosophical: Education has drifted away from primarily focusing on the personal development and intellectual nourishment of the individual and more towards providing training for the workplace. Of course the country needs skilled workers but training school-aged children and young adults to know what side of a spreadsheet to lick is unproductive and wasteful. A curious, imaginative employee with good critical thinking skills, with a positive outlook on life and personal interests and passions beyond the workplace is a far better prospect for an employer and their business than any number of school and university leavers churned out with ready-made BTECs in Hospitality or a 2:2 degrees in Tanning and Waxing Services. Education shouldn't be a sausage factory pushing out worker drones trained to expect nothing more from life than to be told what to do and shouted at for being shit at it. Famously the French don't have a word for entrepreneur, but if they did even they'd know that people don't create and innovate because they have all the right pieces of paper and are efficiently managed but because they're capable of having creative ideas; because they are curious, imaginative people. Education should be about creating creative people imo.
2. Systematic: Primary teachers, just to take a familiar example, teach around 22 hours a week. Each lesson takes about an hour to plan - where planning is a formal procedure which needs to be undertaken in a specific way and documented, along with all the usual gathering and/or creating of the necessary teaching resources. Each lesson takes about an hour to mark - where marking is a formal procedure which needs to be documented along with the usual assessing of work, writing student feedback etc. Heads of department have to sign-off teaching plans - where signing-off is a formal procedure which, of course, has to be documented blah blah blah. They also have to audit teacher marking, assessment and feedback as well as their teachers ongoing practice, which they have to formalise and document etc etc. Deputy heads, have to sign-off the work of the departments etc etc usually while doing some teaching themselves along with all the other data-collection and management stuff. All teaching documentation in a school has to be collected, audited, collated, recorded and stored before its made available in good order to the local branch of the education overwatch directorate, the Academy HQ if there is one (and there usually is these day, another management layer), and the Department for Education, Training and Skills. DoETS coordinates the implementation of government policy and monitors whether each section of the system is meeting all the necessary statutory requirements, from the teacher level up: collecting, auditing, collating, recording, storing and reporting ultimately to the Minister's office. And when the Minister's permanent private secretary enters the room for their weekly Friday morning meeting, a thick folder of statistical printouts under their arm, the Minister is only really interested in whether the graphs are pointing in the right direction and whether they can keep them that way until they're promoted out of their journeyman ministry to somewhere exciting and serious like The Home Office or The Treasury. It's the same in Health. We've created systems which are primarily focused on ensuring there's little chance the Minister is going to have their weekend spoiled. It's a system designed to positively audit the government's performance according to whatever target and/or political imperative they've set their hearts on this month.
Teachers are dropping like flies and legging it off at all stages of their careers, but the fact that nearly half of all recruits are off on their toes within five years of qualifying is a pretty big sign that the system isn't just a bit sub-optimal, but fundamentally breaking down in a serious way. And yet what kind of response to we see from government to whatever 'crisis' is befalling Education at present? A sterner tone, a tighter grip, the taking of firmer control - more 'reforms' just like the last ones to fix the problems which the last reforms caused.
This overburdening is also evident in the fact that all teacher-training these days is on the job training, that is; you teach as you train - you basically
Teach First as the catchy name of the privately contracted American training provider implies. Trainees need to start teaching right away to replace the ones falling out the backend of the mincer. About 80% of teacher training deals with how operate the system, with the remaining 20% or so given over to training for the classroom.
This links into my first point about the driving ethos of education and how successive governments have drifted closer to a view of education as a system-driven endeavour, one which accredits the operators ability to operate the system but with increasingly little regard for what the system is actually aiming to achieve, let alone what it's supposed to be for in the first place.
If the unions have had a contributory role in this I'd say it is in not protesting loudly enough, in accepting the story that they're responsible for the systems failings, in caving in to the perpetual political cycle which adds reform upon reform for the sake of appearances, and for not arguing a stronger case for a cohesive, long-term plan for education based on what the individual can achieve in life, not what the minister might personally achieve from their time in office career-wise.
..... /and relax .....
