The Great Saint Trinians Brain Robbery

Typical.

You do a post that puts the Right-wing boot in on teachers one day, and then your luck takes you to another, much better illustration of how the whole set-up works to promote socialism and anti-patriotism – but mostly promotes schoolchild ignorance. Following a link about saucily-dressed porno schoolteacher from Letters From A Tory, I stumbled upon another little gem which you might already have read.

Here’s one about the whistle-blowing Channel 4 journalist teacher who filmed the anarchy in the classroom she worked in as a supply teacher in a Dispatches programme.

A science teacher who secretly filmed shocking scenes of pupil misbehaviour for a TV documentary has been banned from the classroom for a year.

Alex Dolan remains unrepentant over the filming of rowdy pupils

Alex Dolan said she was "shocked and saddened" that a General Teaching Council panel found her guilty of unacceptable professional conduct.

She said she was merely raising matters of vital public interest.

The GTC panel ruled that Ms Dolan, who also exposed apparent attempts to dupe Ofsted inspectors, breached the trust of pupils and abused her position.

She recorded secret footage at four schools in London and Leeds in 2005.

In its judgment, the panel said it did not accept that the public interest issues raised by the film, part of Channel 4's Dispatches series, justified the use of covert filming.

But Ms Dolan, who was suspended from the teaching register for 12 months, said she still considered that she acted fairly and in the wider public interest.

Note what the court criticised her for and what it suspended her teaching licence for.

Ms Dolan, who also exposed apparent attempts to dupe Ofsted inspectors,..

Still it’s no biggy duping Ofsted, as any reasonable person not a raving fascist Tory would have thought, and so on to the thing that hurts; really huts, a liberal’s sensibilities.

…breached the trust of pupils and abused her position.

Now she didn’t film them naked, or name them (if the clip is representative), and all she did was blur out their faces and watch them monkeying about. She states that this behaviour was typical of 14 out of 16 schools she taught in.

So what ‘trust’ did she betray; the trust so tenderly placed by innocent little children into her unscrupulous hands? The trust not to show them running about and shouting and leaping on desks and preventing any learning from going on?

I wondered at this point whether the court’s philosopher kings were getting any oxygen - perhaps due to their self-restricted air supply and reflexive body posture?

Does a teacher have some liberal-divined ‘duty of care’, perhaps, not to show schoolboys being hooligans and destroying in the process that irreplaceable precious time during which (as we are constantly assured by Left-wing teachers and educationalists) children’s’ minds are at their most fertile and open to knowledge and new experience?

You’d have to be a real curtain-twitching suburban Daily Mail-reading car-polishing-every-Sunday gnomes-on-both-lawns and stand up for the National Anthem fascist to see anything wrong with little children expressing their natural exuberance and curiosity about the world and what their young bodies are capable of…and completely trashing an hour’s worth of the ’education’ of 30 or many more representative of Our Future.

You’d think (albeit only in a parallel universe) that the wholesale negation of the point, purpose, goal and intent of a school is of some kind of public interest – say to taxpayers, parents, politicians, teachers, and even the courts.

But hey, that’s just me? What do I know? I just don’t have the sophisticated reasoning capabilities of the court and its Solomon-like panel which went on:

In its judgment, the panel said it did not accept that the public interest issues raised by the film, part of

Channel 4's Dispatches series, justified the use of covert filming.

So, utterly wasting the time and money of everyone concerned in all those schools is just whatever, but showing it to everyone else concerned is just plain not justified, right? Okay, what would be justified? Actual assault? Threatened assault? Rape or threatened rape? Crystal meth or crack? A racist comment? That might just do it, I guess.

Just how bad does it have to be for the public interest to be served in exposing such destructive behaviour?

Stumps me.

Ideas, anyone?

I Was Right About Teachers Loving Big Brother. Part One.

Alex Dolan defends herself here.

You’ll notice from the Channel 4 interview that her chosen cure for disruption in the classroom is money:

Many of the most needy schools are not given the resources to tackle their problems.

Sorry, did I say ‘money?’ I meant ‘resources,’ which of course can’t be bought with money.

Our fearless investigator touches upon discipline in response to her interlocutors, but she’s a modern British state school teacher through and through, so in the end it comes down to those ‘resources’:

“Very difficult question, unfortunately there will always be pupils in schools that don't want to learn and as teachers we have to put resources in place to cope with that. The current policy of inclusion of disruptive pupils definitely makes things more difficult for teachers, however, I think it's a step in the right direction, but, from what I saw in six months, schools need much greater resources to cope with these pupils who otherwise would have been excluded from schools.”

Though she does have a go at achievement targets:

I think this situation exists because targets have become more important than teaching.

And one last blast for resources:

“There are many things that could be done to improve the lives of teachers and pupils: more classroom assistants, greater support for schools forced to take excluded pupils and higher salaries for teachers to attract more people into the profession.”

Note her protective attitude towards schools and school funding, matching my clumsy and poorly-spelled yet deeply wise words from yesterday:

Teachers are like medieval monks or nuns; utterly devoted to chasing out the devil of inequality and all its offspring. They’ll suffer privations and strikes and long, thankless hours if they think they’re doing the right thing.

Gotta get those precious resources for da kids. This is Channel Four, after all.

I Was Right About Teachers Loving Big Brother. Part Two.

And here’s the Times Education Supplement online comment section for your delight.

Posted by: tonycallaghan 28/03/2009 at 07:38

Alex Dolan the teacher who exposed the 'papering over the cracks' in schools has been banned by the GTC.

This is a Party Political move by the government to deter others from exposing the reality in many of our classrooms.

Alex should be fully supported in what she did. Heads who hide under their desks should be exposed, named and shamed and vilified for their incompetence.

Hmm. Sounds a bit like me. What’s gone wrong with the TES?

Ah this is better…

Posted by: tom clancy 28/03/2009 at 10:49

Tony, Your history on here and in other places demonstrates you have an axe to grind.

Socialist character assassination as a first resort. An ‘axe to grind’, huh? Utterly dishonourable. Maybe the evil tonycallaghan is some kind of Tory or equally morally panicked by anarchy in 14 out of 16 classrooms, d’you think?

2) "exposed the papering over the cracks in schools" ? How many schools?

14 out of 16. Remember reading that bit anywhere, tomclancy? Perhaps not.

Not all. Just carefully selected ones to make a sensationalist programme.

All too true, I’m certain.

Why, sure, a tiny unrepresentative minority of the guys burn a cross or two, maybe bomb a black church and so on, but most of them, they just pray to Jesus and organize bake sales and picnics for America. They worry about the possible future of a multi-cultural society. You can’t tar us all with the same brush by selecting a few isolated incidents, yeah?

She is a journalist, not a teacher.

She’s a teacher, Tom, as well as a journalist. They teach you the word ‘and’ as well as ‘either’ back at teacher training madrassa? People in the real world can have more kinds of jobs than the one you get at 22 and its Education Planet successors.

3) Party political ? OK Where's the proof?

Hmm, maybe tonycallaghan overeggs it here. We all post in haste sometime. Remember my Sarah Michelle Geller is a Republican? Oy.

...But which particular party (out of all the score or so of parties in this country) and that is financed by the teachers’ unions also upholds comprehensive education, removing discipline and utterly opposes parental choice at all times? Any guesses?

4) Alex should be fully supported. Not at all. Her motivation was as a journalist to make a programme (and for her to make her name, perhaps).

Questioning her motives and letting us all know it was for pride and maybe money. Socialist character assassination as a first resort. What’s your motive in minimizing any criticism of ‘education’ in Britain, tomclancy? Are you a net beneficiary of the system perhaps, or just a dumb-as-a-fencepost true believer? Only Lefties’ motives are pure and good, as all TES regulars will attest.

If she had wanted to see changes made in these schools, there were other ways.

Yeah.

She could write to the Daily Mail and be put down in the TES and at NUT conferences as a Tory moral-panicker. She’d never get onto the Beeb, except maybe on Welsh BBC4 at quarter to four on a Sunday morning. She could write to her Local Education Authority or the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Young Folks and Skills and Really Cool Stuff and get a rote answer and be ignored by the people on the inside whose fault this all is and who are interested only in maintaining the system.

But broadcasting moving pictures to show the facts? Unconscionable. Wicked. Just plain wrong.

5) "heads who hide under their desks..." Absolutely agree with you. But this was not the way to do it.

So you’re a sensible man of the people, right, tomclancy and not some hind of Leftie insider? What is the way to do it? Get elected to NUT conference and then be shouted down at Conference as an elitist/fascist/racist fan of the culture of violence? (I’ve actually seen teachers describing schools with corporal punishment as having a ‘culture of violence.’)

by: Traceyjane 29/03/2009 at 00:00

With Tom on this one.

Makes good news!!

Wicked, wicked investigative journalists! The issue’s not the issue, nothing to see, move it along. I’m so sweet.

I can surely see our youngsters working us out of Labour’s economic cluster when their bright young minds are moulded by such as these.

Home.

Here’s the ‘Whistleblowers’ Charter’: another bit of Labour puff that doesn’t work when they need to keep us quiet.

They don't need no bloody pay rise

This from the Spectator’s James Forsyth.

His thoughts - and the thoughts of his first three commenters represent a weird mixture of wisdom and misunderstanding about the teaching profession.

Now that Snuffy’s taking a break from blogging, I thought I might say something about the family business.

The absurd demands of the NUT

James Forsyth

The National Union of Teachers is the spiritual successor to the National Union of Mineworkers; a union representing an honest, decent profession but with a leadership that is committed to an extreme version of leftism. The Union’s latest pay demands are a case in point.

Honest and decent and insanely hardworking, James. My father died in harness: my mother, uncle and cousin had their health broken by the job and only my cousin’s still alive, and other relatives and friends quite the business for reasons of survival. My lovely wife and I both ran screaming from modern-day teacher training as if the hounds of hell were following us.

But it’s not just the leadership.

The Daily Mail reports that:“Teachers want their days in the classroom cut to four a week – with a 10 per cent pay rise."

They’d be lucky to drop to five days a week in reality: my surviving teacher friend gets up at 5 to commute to school for six, and leaves work at the other six, or five, and there’s usually weekend preparation to be done. Don’t get me started on the holiday work. My childhood holidays were punctuated with side trips to gather materials for arts projects and seeds for science lessons. Ma and Pa Northwester never got the chalk from under their fingernails, rest their souls.

The pay rise is a crock.

All experienced teachers get paid according to their years’ service rather than any measure of worth – which is why sensible head teachers (read headmasters and headmistresses) often choose not to re-employ experience at the end of an academic year and hire someone younger and cheaper instead. I have a friend on his seventh year as a qualified teacher and he’s never had a contract for more than one year in that time and has been doing temporary and supply work pretty much every term since he qualified; apparently despite excellent results and popularity, he’s never been given a longer contract because he’s too expensive.

The National Union of Teachers is planning a campaign for contractual rights to spend one day a week marking work and preparing lessons.

It also wants a 35-hour limit on the working week.

Excuse the hollow laughter, but 35 hours? Seven hours per school day? Where are they going to find the tens of thousands of teachers to take up the slack and do all the lesson planning and preparation and marking and tick-boxing for LEA reports and tutoring hopeless would-be teachers and herding Newly Qualified Teachers and meeting-attending and retraining and case conferences and disciplining and listening to the grunts of the one sort of parents and the scholarship-to-Oxbridge-seeking of the other sort of parents. It’s not that there aren’t time-servers and blank files in teaching - I remember them existing even in the 1970s in my grammar school – but laziness is rare, I contend, in the staff rooms. Hard-working cultural Marxists and the other kind of Marxists in the classroom were there a-plenty, I’ll bet, and hard-working others I know for sure, for I grew up amongst them and was trained by them.

Demanding a 10 pay cent pay rise across the board and a reduction in working hours would be a stretch at any time, but to do so in the midst of a recession is just ridiculous. It suggests that the NUT's leadership is just looking for a fight.

Yes, they are. But someone elects them, and it just isn’t a tiny, well-organised extremist bloc. It’s a large, well-organised extremist bloc.

We undervalue teachers in this country.

I bloody don’t, but I get your drift. The underclass are especially vicious to them, as are the pushiest parents who won’t recognize that little Stephanie isn’t going to MIT no matter how nice their 4x4 and the ballet lessons they pay for.

We should offer the best ones more respect…

Respect only at first, I contend…

…and more pay.

...because then we’ll see how well the employment market handles it when schools stop being war zones and anticipating a meeting with parents stops feeling like the lead up to the World Light Heavyweight Championship, shall we? You’ll get a lot fewer resignations if the little sods are no longer allowed to abuse teachers and threaten them with rape, court proceedings or and parental violence.

Doing that will require moving away from national pay-bargaining and allowing individual schools to negotiate with individual teachers and to pay them by results.

Or by the preferences of the headmaster or the governors, or by a lower truancy rate, or by parental choice picking out schools with relaxed and happy teachers. We’re talking parent-controlled vouchers here whatever their criteria of choice, because the next point is bang on the money.

The NUT will go to the wall to prevent any government from allowing this. When it comes to improving education in this country and the respect in which teachers are held in, the NUT are part of the problem not the solution.

And the reason that the commies are elected to NUT leadership is that the teacher training colleges are cultural Marxist and they are owned by the local education authorities. The LEAs control teacher training and head teacher recruitment, pay, curriculum and the fabric of the schools themselves. The beaks themselves (now thoroughly incapable of thinking outside the West-As-Oppressor and children-as-innocent-factory-fodder box) elect the delegates who vote in the policies that continue to ruin education.

This is not just a political battle; it is a cultural one.

It’s no good paying teachers ‘by results’ if the only results they’ll ever manage achieving is via the narrow and dishonest lens that hates our culture and that subverts its norms. I don’t care how good their displays on slavery are: if they exclude mention of and deny the existence and success of the abolitionists and the West Africa Squadron, then the results will be one-sided at best.

Look at the American Press and broadcast media – the mainstream is owned and operated (apart from Fox) by the Left.

To stop the rot, we need to attack its source – indoctrination during training. Ditch the LEAs and strengthen the power to hire and fire to the headmasters and headmistresses; themselves motivated by ambitious and mobile parents, and even the most fanatical Lefties will have to turn up the maths and turn down the Marxism… or lose their jobs.

See, the 60-hours a week teachers are really dedicated. If the current culture survives, then their dedication will be tainted from the outset -at 18 or 21 when they enter teacher training. Teachers are like mediaval monks or nuns; utterly devoted to chasing out the devil of inequality and all its offspring. They’ll suffer privations and strikes and long, thankless hours if they think they’re doing the right thing.

We need to broaden their concept of the ‘right thing’ to include upholding our civilization.

Start them young.

JimBob

Do you seriously think that the nation's biggest champagne socialist collective is 'honest and decent'?

Yep – honest and decent according to their own, blinkered, lights.

Rather than ask for this they should be glad for their job security and we should be looking to chop some of the fat - i.e. administrators, classroom assistants, and the rest.

Verity

How many days' holiday do teachers in Britain get?

Many more than they enjoy. They really do spend most of them at school or in training or on courses. Please don’t let envy and disappointment overcome the truth. A lazy enemy we could defeat easily – but not this honest mob.

Also, what is the basis of their demanding a shorter work week when they are currently the most ineffective teachers in the advanced world. Swathes of British children are leaving school illiterate and innumerate.

The system the unions and LEAs put in place with its ever-lower standards and ever vaguer ‘subjects’ is the result of the rot; not its cause. The power’s in the wrong place, i.e. not with the parents. Feed parents portable cash and let the headmasters sort them out.

Why do the teachers think that failure merits a pay rise? And shorter hours? - given that they have failed to do their job during the hours they currently work?

How could they do what we think of as a good job when they themselves campaigned against discipline and measureable educational standards? By the time we get to this opinion it is a career to late?

Fergus Pickering

Teachers are quite well paid these days but the job is much more horrible than it used to be partly because of all the forms they have to fill in and partly because the children are much more horrible than they used to be. The NUT has always been exactly as it is now.

The unions and the educational theorists and the LEAs made it horrible. Bin them all.

Home.