Induction Complete

My first full time year of teaching has come to an end.

After 960 lessons, some of them I'd rather forget, my induction paperwork has been signed off and forwarded to the Appropriate Body. Better still I was also able to send off my Golden Hello paperwork, so there should be an extra £3500 (after tax) lurking in my September pay packet. After negotiation I should also be progressing to point 4 on the Main Pay Scale, so I will be able to live quite comfortably come the new school year.

It's been a hard year, although not as hard as my PGCE. I take some consolation from the fact that a lot of work I've prepared this year can be used to lighten the load next year. There have been days when I've thought "why am I doing this?", which have thankfully been outweighed by the days where I've delivered good lessons and been surrounded by brilliant kids and supportive colleagues.

For now I'm going to enjoy my summer holidays. I don't plan to go into school too often, but I will be working at home in the last couple of weeks.

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Hard Federations

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a Hard Federation the Government, in its infinite wisdom, produced legislation allowing a single Governing Body (GB) to look after several schools. The idea was that expertise could be pooled into a single GB and redistributed around all those in the partnership, thereby producing a streamlined, efficient and more cohesive form of school governance.

There's only one snag. In the words of Captain Edmund Blackadder "it's bollocks".

Instead of interfering in the smooth running of only one school overzealous Governors are now able to wreak havoc in several. Judging by the nauseating frequency of their visits to school they are clearly trying to compensate for their own inadequate employment status.

You'll also find that Governors formerly on the GB of a secondary school pack more punch than those formerly of a primary school. The aforementioned secondary schools are also under the impression that they're able to dictate routine policy to their primary counterparts, who are expected to fall into line like timid church mice.

Another New Labour policy dreamt up in the public toilets of Hampstead Heath.

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Staffroom Politics

As an NQT I vowed that I'd steer well clear of the inevitable staffroom politics that blights most schools.

My school is no different. We have those who work hard and comply with management instructions and we have those who do their own thing and couldn't care less. As much as I try to focus on doing my own job effectively I am distracted by senior colleagues who are quite happy to drift along in the slow lane, putting in the bare minimum of effort. Their blase attitude is doing our children a disservice.

You'll probably know the sort of people I mean - those who give their lessons completely off the cuff because the previous night they were in that much of a hurry to escape they couldn't be bothered to prepare anything.

I'm also noticing how rude some of my colleagues can be. I would never dream of turning up late to a meeting or playing with my phone, laptop or pile of marking when I got there but that is endemic behaviour in some people who should really know better.

I would never dream of yawning in the face of or talking back to a member of the SMT, but a culture has developed where some people see that as acceptable.

I would never dream of berrating or talking down the Head or Deputy (both of whom I have the utmost time and respect for) to my colleagues, but internal (and Hard Federation) power struggles make subversive conversations an everyday event.

To me these examples show poor manners and a serious lack of professionalism, yet as the new teacher I'm not really in a position to do anything other than sit frustratedly in the background.

What needs to happen is the subversive and workshy few are gripped firmly by the bollocks and hauled back into line or shown the door.

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Snow Days

In common with thousands of other schools around the UK the atrocious weather conditions forced our school, which I will call Mickley Grange from now on, to close for a few days.

It would be no exaggeration to say there were feet of snow lying in the school grounds making access, even by Shank's pony, very difficult indeed. This combined with our rural and sparsely populated catchment area made opening the school impossible on health and safety grounds.

I can understand the logic of closing - deep snow, roads barely passable, pupils and staff travel miles by road to get there every day. On days like this it is dangerous to have pupils and staff braving narrow, slippery, snowbound country roads. Despite the obviously horrendous conditions two groups of people seem to underestimate the magnitude of the situation - Head teachers and parents.

Head's are loathe to close schools because even if classes are diminished to such an extent that no productive learning can take place, many parents consider school a free babysitting service. Parents are loathe for school to close because, perish the thought, they need to make alternative arrangements to entertain their offspring for the day. That is a serious inconvenience to a lot of parents, who simply do not want their children about on a normal working day.

For the first time ever I have seen red weather warnings on the Met Office website. The steady and prolonged snowfall was such that it was utterly pointless for me to clean off the car or dig out the driveway. Even if I had achieved that feat the road to our estate, which is a sharp upwards incline on the homeward journey, was covered in a two-foot-deep blanket of snow. The local news showed pictures of a school bus that slid off the road in a city centre only ten miles from here, so poor were the conditions in the most urban of areas.

Quite simply I was stranded 30 miles away from Mickley Grange with no way of getting in to work for at least a week. The local council had been gritting roads at such a frenetic pace that their salt stocks were running perilously low. As quickly as they ploughed the roads at one end of the town they were impassable again at the other.

If my experience is anything to go by then parents can be assured that school will only be closed if it is an absolute necessity. It definitely isn't done on a whim to give the teachers an extra day in bed!

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