| Ever since this government's term
began, the attitude to teachers has been overshadowed by the mantra that good
teachers cannot be rewarded if it means bad teachers are rewarded, too. That's
why, despite the obvious need for them, big pay rises have not been awarded to
teachers across the board. The latest pay rise was 3.6 per cent--mad in the
present situation. That's why, as well, the long battle over performance-related
pay was fought as teacher numbers slid. The idea is that some kind of year zero can eventually be achieved whereby all the bad teachers are gone and only the good teachers remain. That is why the Government's attempts to relieve the teacher shortage have been so focused on offering incentives to get a new generation of teachers into training. The assumption is that so many of the teachers we have already are bad, that only by starting again can standards be raised. But the teacher shortage is not caused only because of a lack of new teachers coming into the profession. It is also because teaching has a retention problem, with many leaving the profession. These people have their reasons for doing so, which cannot be purely about wanting irresponsibly to "abandon" pupils more permanently. Such an exodus suggests that even beyond the hated union grandstanding, teachers are not happy. Unions and government appear to be in broad agreement that the shortage of teachers is a parlous state of affairs. Oddly, though, they don't seem entirely to agree that the reasons for this may lie in features of the profession itself and the way it is run. Instead, the Government is so suspicious of the idea that teachers may be able to represent themselves, that they have set up the General Teaching Council, a body that will represent teachers whether they want it to or not, and to which they have to pay ￡ 25 a year whether they want to or not. The attitudes of both sides promise to exacerbate rather than solve the problem. Teachers are certainly exacerbating the problem by stressing just how bad things are. Quite a few potential teachers must be put off. And while the Government has made quite a success of convincing the public that bad education is almost exclusively linked to bad teachers represented by destructive unions, it also seems appalling that in a survey last year, working hours for primary teachers averaged 53 hours per week, while secondary teachers clocked up 51 hours. At their spring conferences, the four major teaching unions intend to ballot their members on demanding from government an independent inquiry into working conditions. This follows the McCrone report in Scotland, which produced an agreement to limit hours to 35 per week, with a maximum class contact-time of 22 and a half hours. That sounds most attractive. |