School governance

A day or so before the Conservative Party Conference someone let slip that, in addition to providing for up to 5,000 primary schools to become parent-run Academies, the Party would make it possible (by a liberal interpretation of the law) for these to be run on a profit-making basis.  This, it was argued, would provide a financial stimulus that would ‘smarten up’ the whole system.  Not only would good schools attract more pupils, their proprietors would make a profit.  Wasn’t this just the stimulus that England needed to finally breakthrough all the bureaucracy and academic inertia that (despite what the government claimed about rising standards) seemed to hang like a pall over large sections of our educational system?

“I can’t see anything wrong in that,” said a well-regarded businessman renowned for his willingness to get involved with community issues, “Competition draws the best out of people.  It works well in business, so what is so different about schools?”

Well, what is different about schools is that many of the teachers do what they do, not to get a lot of money, but because they have a feeling that this is the one thing in life they should be doing.  They have a concept of vocation, a compelling sense that, in the fullness of what you think life is all about, you have an individual ‘calling’ to a specific task.  Vocation comes from the Latin word “vocare” meaning ‘to call’ – a sense that there is something almost unique in the role that you personally have to undertake.  In a secular world such an apparently religious view of life may antagonise some, but to many others such a calling is an inexplicable reality.  Many nurses feel such a calling as do some doctors, social workers, artists and very many teachers.  Vocationalism is to professionalism what a covenant is to a contract – it is loaded with deep emotional commitment.

Good teachers, I know from the long years I spent as a headteacher, do those things that nobody else notices as well as those things that everybody sees.  They are essentially self-starting people, but they are certainly not easy to manage; they tend to do those things they believe in and are in the best interest of children.  They will fight any authority that forces them to do something they don’t approve of.  Such people become so caught up in helping children to develop their talents in multiple ways that they never watch the clock.

I fear they are a dying breed.  The reason goes back to the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and government’s intention to root out lazy teachers by defining, in the clearest possible terms, what teachers were paid to do – and paying them ‘well enough’ for the 1,265 hours of formal classroom contact time that was agreed between unions and government.  Over the years this has had the most devastating effect on schools; if you are told that you are paid to do one part of what you had earlier come to see as a bigger task, you will concentrate on that – and let the other bits slip, especially if you see that that is what other people are doing around you.  Which professionally distresses teachers because, as they are forced to recognise day after day, there is no end to what teachers could attempt to do on behalf of their pupils, and there is probably no end to the amount of money that it could cost.  That is why teachers become so bitter when a faltering economy forces governments to reduce funds for education.

If, on the top of all that, teachers were to feel that the proprietor was making a profit on the shoulders of all those hours that they had been putting in for the sake of the children over and above what they were paid for, they would leave the profession in droves.  Schools depend upon good teachers being generous of their time – destroy that sense of vocation and no amount of privatisation will compensate.

See Action 9 of the Briefing Paper

This article is tagged: academies, Conservatives, Teaching, vocation.