What a week

So, there’s one week to go until I start in my new post.  The stress hasn’t exactly dissipated, but I feel more in charge now.  Perhaps the chaos of the GCSE results nationwide has helped me to take my mind off more personal matters.  Events certainly seem to have stirred up the teaching community – I’ve seldom seen so many teachers, across all tiers of management and in all forms of school, so united in decrying the obvious unfairness of how students were graded in the summer exam series.

From a purely selfish point of view, events didn’t affect me too badly: my ‘old’ department (four days left under contract…) saw results rise to above the national average in English Language for the first time in as long as I can remember.  It’s nice to leave on a high, knowing that pretty much all of my kids got what they deserved.  Frankly, it would have been a travesty if they had not – we put in every possible effort to ensure success for as many students as possible, and I can only empathise with how colleagues in less fortunate schools, with more students on the borderlines of grade boundaries, must be feeling.  Actually, that seems to be the situation of my ‘new’ school – results have fallen by over 10% on last year.  It’ll be strange to be going from a department celebrating success to one which will inevitably be feeling defensive and under pressure, through no fault of its own.

Still: matters are beyond us all now.  The gods of the DfE have the potential to order a re-grading, but I very much doubt that this will happen: we’ll just have to put up and move on to the new year, learning from this bitter experience that we’re in a new world now where individual students’ achievements are worth less than government priorities.  Perhaps it was ever thus – but now it’s in the open.

Roll on the election, eh..?

New Beginnings

Tags

GCSE, Teaching

I’m currently suffering a strange, limbo-like feeling.  After ten years in post, from NQT to departmental Data-Monkey, I’m about to start a new phase of my teaching career.  Soon, I’ll be 2nd in Department an a large secondary school on the South coast – leaving behind the trials and tribulations of West Wiltshire (and also leaving behind the best English Department colleagues one could wish for).  Suddenly I’ll be a newbie – no longer the cynical old-hand that I’d become, but a tabula rasa onto which a whole different school culture will gradually be inscribed.  I was in my new school today, sitting in my new classroom, frantically poring over Schemes of Work, policy documents, data and all the rest of the information I suddenly need to get a handle on.  Right now, I’m veering between anticipation and outright terror – and yet, at the same time as I’m looking forward I’m caught looking back.

This week sees the release of GCSE results and, as pretty much the final act of my Data-Monkey role, I’ll be back in my ‘old’ school to undertake the departmental analysis.  Every August since 2002 has been dominated by a sense of fear and trepidation in the build up to the moment the grades are revealed, and this month is no exception – even though, for me personally, there can be no come-back.  For the first time, it doesn’t matter – from an accountability point of view – how well my class has done.  No pay decisions rest on the outcome; no capability procedures or snide, half-hidden SLT judgements lurk in the wings, waiting to pounce.

And yet I still feel the fear; I know that the old nightmares will come in the dark.  And suddenly I realise why: not because of SLT, or Gove and his arbitrary targets, or even a wish not to let my HoD down.  No; the real reason for the anxiety is because – for all that the media will argue otherwise – this matters.  My students deserve to have done well.  They deserve to have seen their efforts rewarded.  And even though I’m now one step removed from the consequences of the results, there’s a distillation of professional pride at play.  I want my students to have succeeded, simply for the success.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I’d been able to feel that purity of need for the last decade?  So there’s my new (academic) year’s resolution: to realise what’s really important.  Only now, when I’m personally detached, can I truly understand that hackneyed trio of letters: ECM.