When I walk past a school nowadays I tend to feel a bit queasy, remembering my years at the chalkface and how hard I found it: the huge classes, mountains of marking, hours of preparation, pugnacious parents, and on top of all that, the stultifying blanket of national-curriculum gobbledygook. But that was a breeze compared to nowadays, when the horror is peaking.
I don’t like to catastrophise, but it looks to me as if our education system is going right down the pan. The preparation, planning, note-taking, sudden irrational initiatives, testing and obligatory arse-covering are at teacher-crushing levels, the whole farrago ruled over by the troubled Ofqual, pitiless Ofsted, ever more desperate and ferocious parents, and plundered by academies. And now, chosen by Nicky “teacher baiter” Morgan, to be Ofsted’s chief inspector, here comes Amanda Spielman, ex-head of Ofqual. Has she ever taught, or been a headteacher? No. Has she had practical day-to-day experience of running schools? No. Has she been educated at a private boarding school with only 12 pupils in her year? Yes. Does she know all about merchant banking, mergers and acquisitions and strategy consulting? Yes. And did she help to set up the Ark “top academy chain”? Yes.
“Will she be impartial?” asks Fielding, hopelessly. “Does she know about linguistics? She should.” Let’s just hope against hope. Because she needs to sort out fellows such as Mike Dwan, multi-millionaire, who established Bright Tribe Multi-Academy Trust and is doing frightfully well “providing services to his own … academies”. Will she thoroughly investigate academy finances? Will she stop forced academisation? Will she fight for smaller classes in all schools, fewer targets, less testing? Will she listen to anything teachers say? Even if they justifiably strike this summer?
I suspect not. Governments have been making more and more of a hash of our education system for decades, and nothing and no one seems able to stop them. Spielman looks like more of the same. And education is our future. But the big greedies seem to have it sewn up, like the rest of the world. Fielding has turned to the philosophy of poet John Cooper Clarke. “Impotent rage is my default setting.” Same here.