On the evening of November 24th 2011 there was a phone call for Caroline from Luton’s Director of Education to tell her that she had been successful in her interview that day for the job of School Improvement Adviser for Luton Borough Council.
In April 2012 Caroline started her new job in Luton and as it is too far away to commute from Winchmore Hill where we lived at the time, we moved to the village of Wavendon near to Woburn in Buckinghamshire.
Actually, it may be a little closer to Milton Keynes than it is to Woburn but just as some people who live in Belsize Park or Kilburn say that they live in Hampstead, so I am telling you that Wavendon is near Woburn.
Incidentally, I’m writing this the day after I had a letter published in The Times and even though I signed off with, “Terry Wilton, Wavendon MK17” The Times printed, TERRY WILTON, Milton Keynes.
Caroline was very happy and excited when she heard that she had been successful. “It’s exactly the job I want,” she kept saying.
Half an hour later, when the initial exhilaration had worn off a little, she suddenly became thoughtful and said to me,
“That means that after March, I’ll never teach again.”
She’s right. She almost certainly won’t and in many ways it is a tragedy that another talented, exceptional and inspirational teacher has left, or as teachers often put it, ”escaped” from the classroom. She didn’t say it with any joy. It was just a statement of fact. For her it is a matter of regret but for most teachers I have known, having less teaching is one of many driving forces behind every career move they ever make.
In Secondary Schools, the problem with the teachers’ career ladder is that the higher you climb up it, the further you are removed from the incentive that caused you to join the profession in the first place - teaching children.
When I obtained my first promotion, the rise in salary was accompanied by a reduction by two in the number of teaching periods that I had every week. The rationale was that I needed the extra time to discharge the extra responsibility for which I was going to be paid the additional salary anyway. It seemed that the salary increase alone was not considered to be enough reward.
When I reached Head of Department level, the substantial salary increase was accompanied by even fewer teaching periods every week. I was teaching 17 lessons out of 25 compared with a main scale teacher who taught 22. In other words, with those extra five periods, I was given a whole additional day a week away from teaching to exercise my extra duties and responsibilities.
In addition to being paid almost twice as much as a main scale teacher, I taught less and was also given an office where I could sit and work but also be inconspicuous while I wasn’t teaching.
The level above me was a Deputy Head and they taught less than half the week as well as having an office and remuneration so high that they are paid on a completely different scale.
Secondary school head teachers are always lamenting how much they miss teaching. In order to show that basically they are still one of the foot soldiers at heart, they all tend to do a little teaching - 3 or 4 periods a week. But what do they teach? A mixed ability Year 9 French group or a mixed ability Year 10 GCSE geography group? No and never!
In a secondary school, the head teacher, because he or she “loves teaching so much,” will almost always, if they are timetabled to teach at all, be timetabled to teach an ‘A’ level group. These are students who have all chosen to study the subject and are usually highly motivated.
The downside for the students is that their illustrious lecturer – because they all lecture rather than teach - is probably fairly useless at imparting concepts and information.
They don't need to be good teachers as very few Secondary Heads reach their position because of their teaching ability. What they are good at is managing, organising, possibly crowd control but most importantly, interview technique.
They don't need to be good teachers as very few Secondary Heads reach their position because of their teaching ability. What they are good at is managing, organising, possibly crowd control but most importantly, interview technique.
The group that the Secondary Head is timetabled to teach will probably find that they have more private study lessons over the year than they ever expected when they embarked on the course because their ‘teacher’ is often called away on urgent business. That’s why I have never heard of a Head teacher with a Year 10 GCSE exam class. Those students would be less able to organise their own studies when their teacher was absent.
Because it is a fact that every promotion is accompanied by a reduction in teaching load, Hunter Davies quoted something I said to him in his 1976 book “The Creighton Report”. I remember the conversation very clearly. We were leaning on the bar of The John Baird public house in Muswell Hill after playing in the school versus staff football match (School 4 - Staff 2).
“If you’re still teaching a full timetable at 30, you’re a failure.”
In the course of my 37 years of teaching I probably worked with more than a thousand teachers but I think I encountered only five who were, in my opinion, genuinely and outstandingly gifted. Those five were all so good and exceptional that promotion was thrust upon them whether they liked it or not. Every one of them though, reached a level where teaching students was not an important or even integral part of their job specification. What an astonishing waste of extraordinary talent!
Every head teacher, whom I have known when they were part of the main teaching force, has told me that the first two years in teaching and the time spent as head of department were the hardest and the most stressful periods. Being a head teacher was a doddle in comparison. The stress in that job is in planning, organisation and meeting targets and nothing to do with teaching and only marginally to do with children.
I feel sorry for the generations of children, especially the girls who need female rôle models, who will never have the opportunity to be captivated and inspired by Caroline’s love of mathematics.
It seems to be socially acceptable nowadays for well educated, high flying intellectuals (as well as politicians), to admit during television or radio interviews that, “I was always awful at maths.”
Last October a survey asked MPs if they felt confident when dealing with numbers. Only 76% of Tories and 72% of Labour MPs surveyed said they did. They would never have admitted such a thing about the English language and writing.
Gwyneth Paltrow seems quite proud of being innumerate:
“I’m terrible at maths. I can’t even do my 6-year-old’s maths homework with her.”
Mariella Frostrup, when introducing Marcus du Sautoy, a maths professor at Oxford University, on the Midweek programme on Radio 4, said that she was worried when she saw his name on the list of guests for the programme because, “along with most people, I am uncomfortable with maths.” Ruby Wax, another of the guests, concurred with this view.
I don’t think that either of them would have admitted to such reservations in the presence of a professor of English.
Anyone who can’t spell ‘percentage’ would be sneered at but it’s OK if you can’t work one out. You never hear anyone admit to being uneducated or uncomfortable with words but being weak at maths is just as bad and just as shameful as being illiterate.
Until gifted, effective and successful teachers, (especially maths teachers) are paid as much as administrators, managers and organisers of education, things will never change.
******
I was first aware how gifted a teacher Caroline is (and therefore how different she is from me) about fifteen years ago. For reasons that I don’t need to go into now, I had stopped teaching geography altogether even though my degree was in that subject, and my very limited teaching timetable was with bottom-set maths groups. Things were good with all my classes except for one and that was a Year 9 (13/14 years old) class that was making no progress at all.
Caroline was Head of Maths at the time and I mentioned this to her one day and told her that in my opinion, the group was unteachable. She offered to come in and teach them for one lesson and she suggested that I stay in the room and act as the classroom assistant.
As soon as she entered the room all 16 of them stopped what they were doing and sat down, staring at her in silence. But that didn’t impress me. This was a new situation for them and they were just sizing her up. I waited with some glee to see what happened in five minutes when the novelty had worn off.
She launched straight into an activity and every single one of them joined in immediately. For the next 45 minutes I saw this group in a light that I had never seen before and could never have imagined. They smiled; they laughed; they all participated; they all were nice to each other and most importantly of all, they all learnt!
They asked if she would be teaching them again and were genuinely disappointed when she told them that she wouldn’t.
You can imagine how that made me feel
