Sunday, 26 September 2010

Open Evening

Bums on seats are what provide schools with the funds necessary to put you the teacher in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard, a set of textbooks and a pay cheque just robust enough to wave away the wolves from your modest middle-class front door. Every one of these bums squeezes out of the government a couple of grand a year and thus we have in simple terms two types of school – the under subscribed and the over subscribed.

Don’t be under the mistaken illusion that under subscribed schools are shit and over subscribed schools are good, even if the Coalition government seems capable of one day refining Ofsted’s inspection criteria down to these two base judgements. For those that have worked in both flavoured establishments, the difference is subtle and in many cases at odds with local perceptions. In fact, it is local perceptions that help drive a school towards one of these two poles. Parents, where possible, move home away from the Undies (as we might call the under subscribed schools) to live nearer the Overies (the places with such good reputations that the entry criteria is the ability to smell the PE changing rooms from your own back garden.) The result is that the Undies get the students of parents unable to move home, while the Overies find that the surrounding residential area has over-inflated property prices due to demand and therefore house only those students whose parents can afford to buy or rent there. The difference between the two sets of parents is usually therefore a socio-economic one, and this sadly creates different sets of baggage for the students in the two schools: the Undies harbour a greater number of students from less prosperous and/or less stable and/or less academically successful households, while the Overies get to feast on students whose parents actually use the term “and/or” in their correspondence. (And the word “actually” for that matter… And the phrase “for that matter” incidentally… And… ok, moving on)

Now, back to bums on seats. The Overies are not all complacent about remaining Overies, unless they are selective schools that cream off much of the district’s most academic (i.e. good at tests) kids. Many Overies were once Undies and had to work fucking hard to set the snowball rolling in the opposite direction. They know that the bum rush could one day dry up and so they must maintain their appeal to the local child-bearers. As for the Undies, they have to convince parents that they’re not as shit as they appear (from their shitty results and articles in a vindictive local press) so that they can attract as many bums on seats as possible that want to be bums on seats there and not just bums that have to settle for seats they didn’t want, because the seats where they wanted to put their bums have all been taken by bums sitting in bigger gardens a mere waft of sweaty arm-pits away from their local Overy establishment.

Therefore, for the Overies and for the Undies, Open Evening is the biggest night of the year. This is when a school slaps on its lipstick, takes out it’s most appealing low-cut dress and flashes the local community its most charming smile in an effort to say, “Come and plant that bum on my seat, mister.”

Yes, I agree. I know what you’re thinking. That’s not the most suitable metaphor for the process of attracting 11 year olds and their parents into choosing your school for their secondary education. But it’s correct. We do indeed spruce ourselves up and put on a good show, because we want to look our best. Which is why students are sent home early on that day and come in late the day after to find the school completely unrecognisable. All the displays are new, there are signs up showing the direction to each department, there are plants – yes, organic wildlife – dotted around the place and there’s no sign of even one stray coke can, bent chair leg or graffiti penis anywhere.

So, what happens on Open Evening? Each department displays its best resources and examples of student work and invites prospective students to take part in a fun activity that totally misrepresents what lessons will be like in practice once they join the school. But the kids don’t mind, because they win sweets.

The resources on show can sometimes offer an alternative reality as well. When a child is handling historical artefacts, or using some amazing technological gadget or getting to play with keyboards in the music department, you know full well that these things cost too much to risk taking out except in A’level lessons, because otherwise they’ll get trashed.

But the kids don’t mind, because they get to play with stuff and get sweets and the teachers are fun. Only, you know by half six when you’re face feels like it’s been stretched round the fat side of a tennis racquet that your smile has been false all Open Evening, because you’ve been here for 10 hours and some little shit is sticking a school prospectus into the Bunsen burner as an experiment while his Dad asks you difficult questions on account of him being a parent-governor and therefore an ill-informed nosey do-gooder.

Open Evenings provide teachers with their longest working day of the year. If you’re working in one of the Overies, then 45 minutes after the advertised finish time, with so many punters still loitering and asking about your policy for “pushing more able children” (and fuck me, everyone’s child is more able!) then your fixed smile looks so murderous that only those with social insight uncommon to their socio-economic group feel the need to climb back over the fence into their back garden before you say something mildly offensive to them. And if you work in one of the Undies, then you can start packing up an hour early, because the third set of parents have already been past your corridor and your exercise in futility has exhausted you.

Friday, 17 September 2010

The Start of Term

You were anxious that you’d forget to go back to work on September 1st because for the last 6 weeks, days and dates have dissolved into one big soup of inertia and apathy and you’ve lost any sense of time. Fortunately, you will be alerted to the fact that the start of term approaches by the following occurrences:

- Trailers on TV for the new series of The Inbetweeners and Waterloo Road;
- You can’t fit your trolley through the supermarket entrance without knocking into a display of special offer “Back to Skool” stationary (you curse the dickhead who suggested the deliberate mis-spelling of this slogan);
- There is a long queue of shaggy-haired young boys with their mums in the barbers.

The day the supermarket runs dry of “Back to Skool” stationary is the day you should be back at work.

INSET day! No kids. Every teacher wears their own clothes, women splash on fake tan and the men sport their summer beard for the final time. The Head, in casual corduroy trousers and mis-matched jumper, delivers his state of the nation speech, flashes up the exam results on a powerpoint and rallies the troops. Then he gets all the newbies to stand up to be introduced, while the rest of you ask yourselves in reference to each one, “would I?”

Then chaos commences. Because no matter what work and preparation anyone has done over the summer, the inability for anyone to liase with each other means that everything is only 80% ready.

Everything apart from the IT system, which is about 30% ready, because the network support team have spent the summer eating pies, watching porn, doing 3 hour days and hiding each others’ trousers round the school for a joke.

Two days later the kids come back. Starting with the Year 7’s. In the bad old days, you’d be bending over backwards to introduce the nervy little ‘uns into secondary school life with a friendly, gentle approach. Nowadays, you find your chin on your chest as you watch open-mouthed at how overly confident and cocky the new generation have turned out. What the fuck do they do in primary schools? Train them to be Big Brother contestants? As it turns out, this mouthy minority colour your view, you end up shouting at a whole class and 2/3 of them go home with piss-stains in their new “Back to Skool” trousers due to the trauma.

Then the older kids return. And it’s like you’d never had six weeks of daytime TV, hour-long baths at 2pm and making arse-moulds out of your sofa. All the behavioural baggage they took away last July, they bring back in September. You wonder about their lives in those 6 weeks and realise it was much the same as yours, but probably involved more hanging around McDonald’s and park playgrounds.

You plan your lessons for the first week: Give out exercise books, re-establish ground rules, draw a title page. By the 3rd day, after 18 lessons of this, the students crave intellectual challenge and start asking questions about the news. Like, why does everyone hate the old man in the disabled car? He’s the Pope, you say.

And then you get on with the job of starting to teach your new GCSE syllabus, which you spent many hours planning over the summer (between baths and the human abattoir that is known as The Jeremy Kyle show) knowing full well that the fucking Tories want to replace it as soon as possible with a different qualification which will improve standards of education in this country, standards that have fallen every successive year under Labour. (Based purely on the evidence of the Jeremy Kyle show rather than a less-sensational, media-appealing body of evidence such as exam results and Ofsted inspection reports, which tend to offer the opposite view.)

Finally, you open your new academic diary and with your fresh gel pen you neatly write dates for parents’ evenings and reports, before counting the number of days left until half term, when for one small week, you get to be a blob again.