It’s been a long time – 10 months according to my blog stats – since I have done more than merely contemplate writing another post. Instead, with both children now at school, I’ve immersed myself in re-learning how to teach after 6 years off from the profession: not this time as a teacher, but as a TA (with a little bit of teaching thrown in …!) at my children’s lower school.

When I left teaching  to be a full-time mother, I had begun to fall out of love with the job. I say ‘job’ and not ‘profession’ because I believe that the profession of teaching is and always will be an honourable and exciting one: working with children and young people who make every day different and challenging, trying to inspire a love of knowledge and exploration that will be life-long and in turn being challenged, inspired and constantly surprised by the children you work with. However, this was no longer the job that I found myself doing. There was little or no choice in what could be taught in the classroom: where I taught – in an Upper school – the curriculum in Years 10-13 was dictated by GCSE and A Level syllabuses and in Year 9 by the abysmal SATS. Not only was professional judgement restricted by external tests, but – because of the pressure put on schools – it was also ham-strung by various internal assessment tests, which meant that I felt like some kind of glorified data-entry clerk.

Moreover, the tests produced the kind of data which was easy to reproduce in graphs and tables and percentages. Try fitting ‘James has worked hard this term to improve his spelling and punctuation. To improve further, he now needs to support all his points with evidence from the text’ into a spreadsheet, then convert it into a some kind of quantifiable score. Oh, and then remember that James lives in house with two parents who have mental health issues and he gets up every night to see to his baby brother when his parents aren’t able to. Quantify that.

I don’t know if I expected primary education to be different. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have probably realised that it was unlikely to have escaped the endless onslaught of quantification. It hasn’t. Phonics – although not without its merits in the very early stages of reading and writing – is beloved of governments because of its easily quantifiable nature. How many letter sounds/digraphs does a child know? Can they blend and segment? Can they – my least favourite thing to do with phonics – identify ‘alien’ words and real words? Tick! Tick! Tick! Enter a  number in a spreadsheet and out comes verifiable progress (!)

This continues further up the school, where 6 and 7, 8 and 9 year olds are now required to identify parts of speech that most of my A Level students couldn’t identify – and some of which are still up for debate amongst professional linguists. Experiencing this as a parent as well as a teacher makes it both professionally and personally frustrating. I work in an amazing school, with committed and professional staff who teach lovely, creative and enthusiastic children. If only the ‘profession’ could be treated as ‘professionals’ – people who are more than capable of designing, implementing and assessing their own curriculum. Perhaps then we would view government interference in the curriculum with the same shock and aversion as we would do if they suddenly started telling doctors what to prescribe their patents and measuring their progress by how quickly they recovered from bouts of ‘flu or chicken pox.

At the moment, government and –  because of the way this ‘trickles down’ – a significant proportion of the general public, view the teaching profession in a similar way to my six year old who, when I referred to what I did as ‘work’ said, ‘That’s not work! You don’t work, Mummy. Daddy goes to work.’ Clearly a future politician in-waiting…