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New Junior School Class Loses Teaching Assistant

My daughter has just begun Junior School, and she is happy and excited in her lovely new uniform.  On Friday us parents were invited to a meet the teacher session which was overall very positive.  Unfortunately we also found out that my daughters class has absolutely no teaching assistant support at all.  Last term we were told that due to cuts we were only to have a TA once or twice a week.  Now nothing.  The other classes in her year are more in need.

The teacher asked if anyone would like to volunteer to read with children, or help them with handwriting, or show them an interesting new skill etc.  I am the class representative, and I am asking the other parents if there is anything they can do to help.  Which feels positive and supportive.

At the same time I am angry and upset because I think our children will now be in a class which has to be very tightly controlled, the emphasis will have to be on rules, boundaries and discipline because how else can one teacher manage thirty 7 – 8 year olds?

My daughter was 6 two weeks ago.  She is one of the youngest in her class and school exhausts her.  She is clever and sociable and so she is coping well, but I worry that she is showing signs of stress.  She’s only seven!  She is angry and withdrawn some afternoons after school.

I think this is a good opportunity for schools and parents to bond, and to show mutual support.  I really love our schools, I don’t want to feel angry like this.  I hope I can do something to help.

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Stressed at School

For half an afternoon a week, I used to volunteer at daughter’s infant school. Whilst, I know that my daughter’s infant school is/was an “outstanding school” with dedicated, brilliant, hard-working teachers, I was nonetheless shocked to enter the classrooms and see how chaotic a room of 30 five-year olds was. Spending time, week after week in the classroom, I came to the realisation that there were simply too many children in that classroom. Thirty, five-year-old children in one classroom struggled to sit still for the time enough time required for the teacher to talk. Teaching was regularly interrupted, understandably by children needing water, the toilet or simply wanting to share their thoughts about the subject being discussed.  Many of the children seemed bored by the lengthy times spent having to sit on the carpet or at their desk, being talked at and their attention clearly waivered. With such large classrooms the learning seemed often to occur by rote with little time for questions or exploration of the subject.  It seemed to me the ‘real learning’ for most of the children occurred when teaching support staff, who took small groups out of the classroom in groups of 4 and 5 to concentrate on a specific area usually reading or maths. I myself, helped children with their reading and maths in small groups of up four which worked well. The environment was intense, noisy and physically cramped and I often came home feeling slightly overwhelmed, thinking it was a miracle, that the children learnt anything.

I was therefore horrified to hear that in my daughters very well-respected junior school, the class size would now be 32 in an even smaller classroom. When I investigated further, I found that class sizes of 32 are standard across the city. As parents we have come to accept this as a norm but from my experience, it is clear to me that this it is not a healthy environment for children or their learning or for the teachers.

 My daughter is now 8 and (like many I’m sure) she continues to be a very lively, boisterous thing. At home she never stops moving and/or singing. She ‘gets’ what needs to happen at school so complies, but when I pick her up from school, I can see that it has been a struggle to sit still, to hold it together, to stop talking, to concentrate and to try and learn. Being at school for her clearly requires lots of effort and it means when we get home she can often be quite emotional with lots of mixed up feelings. I can see she finds school stressful and I am certain it doesn’t have to be this way.

 I consider our family lucky. Her teachers are brilliant, the school is one of the best locally and very highly regarded. I still have lots of contact with the school and I can see everyone at school she encounters tries their hardest to to do their best by her. However, there is no getting away from the fact, I feel that her class is too big with too many children with different, competing and at times complex needs.  The fact that 2/3 of schools locally have had to reduce school support staff really worries me. I know that, it is these staff that have historically supported teachers to ensure learning can happen for all the children. The fact that my daughter learns anything is a testament to the hard work of her teachers and the support staff. If our school were to lose any more support staff, I am certain my daughter’s learning would grind to a complete halt.

Finally, I wish school could be more of a joyous experience for my daughter. I wish it could be an experience filled with a sense of wonder, pleasure and discovery, rather than an experience she simply must endure. It makes me sad for her and for the children of her time and I worry that collectively as parents we are allowing the government of the day to fail them.

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Headteacher resigns over cuts

I was a teacher from September 1980 until August 2017, with two short breaks for maternity leave. Despite moving up though the ranks, becoming a Head in 2014, I never stopped teaching, with the quest for outstanding teaching and learning being my passion. In many ways, the 9 years I spent as an AST were the most fulfilling, but I succumbed to headship because I wanted to influence T&L across a whole school; I adopted Steve Covey’s, ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing’, with T&L being that ‘main thing’.

Unfortunately, as soon as I picked up the reins, I could see that the school was heading towards financial difficulties in the next academic year, due to cuts in funding and rising costs. Many may not know this, but a stand-alone Academy cannot submit a deficit budget without the threat of being put into financial special measures by the Education Funding Agency (EFA), so I had no choice but to take evasive action.

Whilst it was my strong belief that I should devote my time to leading T&L, I had to put the ‘main thing’ to one side and become a financial strategist, which is hardly what I trained for. Staffing is easily the biggest financial outlay of a school, so that is where I had to start. I wrote a 12-page ‘staffing restructure and deficit reduction plan’, which was no mean feat, and whilst its contents are lengthy and probably not interesting to many, I detail it below, because you need to be aware of just how many cuts I had to make, and how serious and unpalatable they were:

•            The number of planning periods per teacher per cycle decreased by one

•            The number of teaching groups in Years 7 and 8 decreased by one (thus larger classes)

•            The ‘extra’ teaching groups in the core subjects in Years 10 and 11 removed

•            The disapplication groups in Year 10, except for SEN pupils, removed

•            VCert music removed as a GCSE option for Year 10

•            Food technology removed as a GCSE option for Year 10 and removed from KS3

•            AS French removed as an option for Year 12

•            Art and photography taught together in Years 12 and 13

•            Workskills Springboard removed from Year 12

•            Departmental capitation reduced by approximately 10%

•            CPD limited to training for the new exam specifications only

•            Stationery ordered centrally, not by department

•            Work experience removed for the majority of pupils in Year 11 (only remaining for the few who would really benefit)

•            Business & Enterprise budget reduced

•            Alternative curriculum reduced

•            The equivalent of one full time post removed from the SLT team, and the portfolio distributed amongst the remaining SLT members

•            One food technology teacher post removed

•            All 4 Lead Practitioner posts removed

•            The fourth post on the leadership spine not undertaking SLT responsibilities removed

•            The number of TLR points per subject leader, and the number of non-contact periods per subject leader, to be based solely on the number of teaching periods delivered by the department (thus leading to a reduction)

•            TLRs for Thinking skills, Data, Business & Enterprise and Work-related learning removed

•            The TLR for Alternative Curriculum reduced from TLR 2 to TLR 1

•            The TLR for Exams reduced from TLR 2 to TLR 1

•            One science technician post removed

•            One food technology technician post removed

•            The administrative roles of 1) Cover/attendance, 2) First Aid/Administrator, and 3) Educational Visits Coordinator amalgamated into two roles

I cannot begin to explain how upsetting and disagreeable I found these changes to be; they amounted to a saving of approximately £410,000 and yet by the end of the following academic year, it was clear that we would have to cut more subjects at A-level and more staff, and that is when I decided I could not and would not go on. I felt that I would be condoning the government’s regime of underfunding if I continued to hack away at the curriculum and staffing still further, just to balance the books, especially as it struck me that it was likely to become an annual occurrence.

I was coming up to 60 when I reached ‘enough is enough’, and in that sense I was more in a position to ‘go’ than a Head in their 30’s or 40’s say, but I had been a single parent for 21 years by then, my two daughters were saddled with huge student debt (after completing 5 university courses between them), and I had an interest-only mortgage, meaning I would have to sell my house to pay it off, so my decision wasn’t without its complications.

But personally, it’s the emotional toll, not the financial one, that I feel most acutely. I ‘went’ at least 5 years too early, with so much  left to give.

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More teaching hours, less planning time, less marking time

I am a teacher in a Sixth Form College. Over the last few years, the number of full time teaching hours per week has increased from 21 to nearly 26 hours. Out of a 30-hour College week, this means many staff working from 8.40 to 4.10pm with only lunch breaks, which are inevitably taken up with preparing lessons, moving resources etc.

The increase in hours is directly attributable to the huge cuts in Post-16 education. The increase in hours means as teachers we now have to do nearly all our planning and marking out of school time. The marking load in Post-16 is huge, as you can imagine A Level students write long essays! The end outcomes of these cuts result in one or more of these:

a) Teachers make short cuts in marking and planning, resulting in less well prepared lessons and less formal feedback for the students

b) Teachers work for 3+hours per night outside of College

c) Teachers work part-time hours and plan/mark on their ‘days off’

d) Teachers leave the profession

With rising mental health problems in teenagers, we need more time to nurture these students, not less. In my neediest GCSE retake classes with students with all sorts of SEN issues, there is hardly ever a teaching assistant. Students who are making transitions from PRUs back into mainstream education are expected to cope with the demands of independent BTEC learning with no in-class support, as there is no money to provide this support.

Teachers are leaving in droves, and never because of the teaching.

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Hidden scandal of the erosion of SEND services

What follows is a personal story, but I am writing it is an illustration of what is happening in SEND services across the land. Last September I retired after 32 years of being a teacher, mostly in Local Authority SEND support services and special facilities. I took early retirement at 55 because I couldn’t tolerate the stress of working twice the number of contracted hours that I was supposed to work, due to absurd workload, and the stress of feeling that I was failing vulnerable children and their families.

This workload increase, and reduced provision for children, was caused by covering the work of other people whose posts had been “deleted” in response to government cuts (the loss of the Revenue Support Grant and the real terms diminution of the High Needs Block which LAs receive to pay for SEND services, special schools and EHCPs).

To make it worse, most LAs SEND support services have been marketised: schools have to pay for them – but from nothing!  With schools having ever reducing budgets they stop purchasing LA services, then more cuts are made to services, and teachers workloads increase, and the services to children and parents decline; and then the remaining services are deemed to be of little help by schools and parents, because they don’t have enough staff to do a good job any more.

This is happening across the land  – SEND services evaporating everywhere – and on the whole only the parents of children effected and the teachers in those services really know the size of the cuts and the size of workload the remaining teachers face.

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School Counselling Cuts

My eldest boy struggles with anxiety. In year 1 he was referred for school
counselling to help him manage his anxiety and emotions. The waiting list was 6 weeks but he was allocated a slot & received 6 sessions of art therapy with a
brilliant school counsellor who came into the school once a week & spent the day seeing children. She helped him greatly & showed him ways to deal with his anxiety.

Fast-forward several years. He’s now in Year 4 & despite having his ups & downs has progressed well through school, still loving his art & using it as a form of relaxation. However around October last year something changed & his anxiety became so bad he developed insomnia. We tried everything we could think of to help him (meeting with his teachers, relaxation techniques etc.) but to no avail. It was a tough time for us all. I enquired with the school as to whether he could be referred for more school counselling. The response was that the waiting list was very long & he wouldn’t be considered high need enough. I later found out that the reason for this was because they’d had to cut the school counselling hours by half to help make up the funding shortfall.

Fortunately we were able to pay for him to have private art therapy sessions.
Other families though are not in a position to be able to do this. It is therefore a
greater tragedy that a child struggling with their social emotional well being,
either at school or home, is limited in the support they receive due to a funding
shortfall, especially as an expanding body of evidence highlights that people do better in life when mental health problems and related disorders are tackled early.