In what seems like an eternity ago, once upon a time in the deep, dark, dank days of yore, I worked for a season as a curriculum writer at the NSW Department of Education. This wasn't because I have any desire to be a teacher or educator but because they needed someone to fill a post in an office.
In our wee little office in One Oxford Street, there were 12 desks, and for the 14 months that I was there, no more than 6 people occupying any of those desks. Staff turnover was so frequent that I saw 52 people cycle through those desks, and I was the 53rd person to leave.
Admittedly this is because the manager whom we reported to, was alternatively cruel, permissive, would want to micro manage every part of a task, or give you no direction whatsoever. As far as random reinforcement goes, I have a very high tolerance for people being knaves but eventually I too found my upper limit and had to quit the job.
If this was an indication the culture which permeated the most internal workings of the NSW Department of Education, then I have no idea how that projects outward to the actual people who do the real work of educating. I do not know if it is still relevant or accurate but from my time looking outwards from the centre of the D of E, I've at least had some idea of the continuing debates around education for about two decades. If I apply my skills which I might have absorbed as a forensic accountant, then allow me to pontificate on a subject on which I only have a passing glance. For it seems to me that the discussions which rage today are identical to those deep. dark, dank days of yore.
The really scary fact facing the Department of Education is that there is a teacher shortage. This is compounded by the second really scary fact that only 50% of teaching students finish their degree. This is further compounded by the third really scary fact that on the teacher training has always been inadequate and that teaching might very well be one of those professions that can not even be taught through training.
I think that it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said that "Hell is other people." When you have 28 such other people, most of whom don't have fully formed mental capacities, characters, or impulse controls, then how do you better prepare teachers for the classroom? It seems from the outside like an impossible task.
1. Respect Teachers' Skills & Autonomy.
Surely this is the most obvious point of action in any workplace. If you are employing someone to do a job, an a professional job at that, and a job which has meant that someone has had to go to university, and a job which means standing in front of a horde of semi-controlled monsters all day long, then the very least that you can do is respect that this person is doing a difficult job, that they are trained to do that job, and that they should be given the necessary time and space to do that job.
2. Pay Teachers Appropriately.
I know that this might sound like an anathema to right-wing trash-governments who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and who want to use education as nothing more than an economic signalling process to ensure that their own horrid little sprogs get employed but as teachers are professionals who have gone to university and who stand in front of monsters all day long, then they should be given a respectable remuneration which shows the value that the rest of us think education is worth.
This might sound trite but workers who work, deserve their wages. Workers who do work that people who sit far away in offices, do not want to do, deserve their wages more.
3.Resource The Schools Dealing With The Most Expensive To Teach Children, The Most.
It should stand to reason that the schools who actually have to educate those children with learning and behavioural challenges, should be given extra resources to do so. I do not believe in equality. People are not the same. What is more important is equity. Equity shouts from the rooftops that every single person is valuable and should be given the best opportunity to learn; which itself poses a whole host of challenges.
4. Abandon The Notion That The Only Thing Which Is Important Is That Which Can Be Measured.
Of course I know that education means that there are going to be standards which need to be met, measured and quantified. Of course I know that testing and evaluating skills according to the attainment and applied demonstration of key learning areas within subjects and disciplines is important. However, standardised test scores are not the only thing which is important.
We send children through an education system for more than a decade; the reason why we do this is that things like literacy, numeracy, and having a decent set of knowledge and skills before one enters the workforce is not only valuable to the individual but to society generally.
The problem is that those people who think that education is purely about STEM subjects and about producing servile little computers, only believe in what can be plotted on a graph. It used to be that the only degree which existed were Bachelors and Doctorates in Philosophy. Why? Because philosophy encompasses a general theory about knowledge which includes the abstract and useful arts, and the theoretical and applied sciences.
Education should also be about fun, joy, building the person into a more complete version of themselves and a more complete member of society. The people who only see education as useful for producing technical specialists, are idiots.
5. Recognise That Joy Is Necessary For Teachers To Teach & Children To Learn.
From a policy standpoint, there needs to be at least some kind of tacit admission that in a workplace which might have as many as 30 people in a confined space, that those intangible things like creativity and flexibility, collaboration, co-operation, the relationships which exist between teachers and students, between students and students, and yes between teachers and teachers are all essential to helping teachers teach & children learn.
I mention the word 'joy' not because of some unattainable notion of glibness but because if you're going to be at a workplace for 40 hours a week, it had better be a semi-pleasant experience. Merely presuming and trying to extract happiness because teachers love to teach, is a sure-fire path to ensuring burn-out; thus leading to teacher shortages in the first place.
6. Do Mot Make Policy Decisions About Education And Schools Without Including Teachers.
Bureaucrats in offices who are two, twenty, two-hundred kilometres away, have no idea what happens in schools. Politicians who work in offices also have no idea what happens in schools.
Teachers and Principals are the people who work at the workplaces. As it is, all teachers have a supervisor and many of them have a collaborative plan with other teachers in their year group or stage. Teachers work collaboratively with other teachers in their staff room. They are the ones who witness first hand what is needed to do the job and what is needed to improve it. Teachers need to be consulted about what happens to them. Teachers need to be consulted about what happens to their workplaces. Teachers need to be able to give feedback to the people who work in offices about what their workplaces are like, what problems and challenges exist,
7. Remove Unnecessary Admin Tasks.
Administration is necessary in a bunch of fields and is best done by administrators. That might mean giving schools big enough budgets to employ administrators and enough clerical staff to do those jobs properly. I know that this is a wacky idea but Teachers should teach. Giving Teachers administration tasks which in some cases are designed to save the bacon of bureaucrats and politicians, is an explicit waste of their time.
It seems to me that the current song sheets which the NSW State Government are currently handing out, to be sung by an increasingly vapid media, are demonstrably untrue and highly disrespectful. I have no idea how the current stance by the right wing trashmedia is supposed to help with the teacher shortage and as far as I am concerned it amounts to little more than teacher bashing for nothing more than selling advert space.
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