https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=11007051#
There is no workload crisis – just politics
Published in TES magazine on 24 April, 2015 | By: John Blake
As the government tries to placate teachers with promises to reduce stress, we must ask what the activists are really fighting for
Workload is the word of the moment. It has achieved the ultimate accolade: a government inquiry. The Workload Challenge, instituted by Nicky Morgan early in her time as education secretary, famously gathered tens of thousands of responses from teachers and generated concrete policy proposals from the Department for Education.
Do read the full article!Dangerous discourse
This is why the workload discourse is so dangerous, because this time, a problem has been found that is accepted by leading politicians. If this were solely about workload, would so many teachers be hostile to phonics, despite the clear evidence that it contributes to improving students’ reading? Of course not, because teachers’ workloads would be substantially reduced if all pupils learned to read properly at primary school.
But the objection isn’t to workload per se. It is an ideological objection to the nature of the work – in this case, objecting that a practical rather than bohemian approach to teaching children to read undermines a “love of reading”.
A conviction that the purpose of education is damaged by phonics (or strict classroom behaviour management protocols, or schools outside the local authority system, and so on) may be a perfectly valid belief to hold, but it is not one that most parents agree with, nor is it one that successive governments have accepted, in large part because such utopian beliefs were responsible for catastrophic education failures in the past.
The government should examine the substance of complaints from people who profoundly disagree with the model of education they are being asked to provide. When activists throw around claims about the numbers of people leaving the profession, politicians should not be callous, but they should consider that a teacher’s decision to leave an environment with which they are wildly out-of-sync is not necessarily a tragedy if the government is confident of what it is asking schools to do.
Ministers should be wary of feeding a discourse of workload crisis when the only actions they can take are likely to be either too small to be noticeable or so vast that they reverse trends of accountability built up over decades. After all, this accountability ensures that an elected government can – as it is both entitled and required to do – impose its vision of education and be held accountable for its delivery.