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Tag: teacher

  • Teaching Portfolios: Do we need them?

    Ever since I became a teacher in 2009 I’ve been keeping everything I’ve done. For the first two years as a PRT (Provisionally Registered Teacher) it was pretty much part of the process of what was expected to keep track of my progress, my teaching, and my career. After that, it had become somewhat second nature and with the appraisal process becoming much less trustworthy with the introduction of the Education Council (renamed Teacher’s Council), schools and principals were encouraged to tighten their systems of appraisal and were expected to have their staff collect evidence that they were meeting each of the 12 criteria at the time.

    On top of this, teachers were also encouraged to carry out what has become known as “Teacher Inquiry” where teachers inquired into their own practise and how they might be better teachers for their classes and students.

    Although I’d known no different and all of this was second nature and just part of the job, it is a lot of work on top of what we have to do day in and day out – the core business of teaching. It quickly became one of the number one pieces of paperwork and time consumers for teachers.

    Along came Labour, winning the 2017 election and swiftly removing the ‘Education Council’ and returning it to the teachers. With the pay negotiations came the agreement to address the workload. And with that the appraisal process, of which teacher inquiry and portfolios had become synonymous with.

    In September 2019, the following paragraph was released from the Teaching Council website in regards to it’s requirements around portfolios and inquiry.

     

    The Teaching Council would like to clarify what it expects for the issue or renewal of a practising certificate.
    The issue or renewal of a practising certificate will be based on an endorsement made by the professional leader, based on the teacher’s participation in a system that includes:

    • an annual summary report that states whether or not the appraisee meets the Standards or Ngā Paerewa
      • the annual summary report is the only teacher documentation that is required for the purposes of the audit ERO undertakes on behalf of the Teaching Council
    • that appraisees have been observed once annually and involved in two conversations ideally with an appraiser who is familiar with the day to day work of the teacher
      • the Council has listened to the profession and accepts that one observation may suffice for fully certificated teachers.

    We do not ask (nor do we require) to see copies of the annual summary report, or any evidence. We rely on the professional judgement of the appraiser and the leader making the endorsement.

    While schools and centres are free to design their appraisal processes there is no requirement in law or by any agency that an appraisal system must include:

    1. an inquiry to be undertaken by teachers

    2. reports to be kept of all the professional development teachers do

    3. a portfolio of evidence compiled by teachers

     

    So essentially, it is not the Teacher’s Council that requires you to collect evidence, or complete an inquiry, but your school and/or principal. However, schools and principals feel that they have to get teachers to do these in order to have something to sign off on for the annual summary report. They don’t, but they might feel that they have to have some kind of evidence that teachers are meeting the criteria when signing off the annual summary report.

    Regardless, I return to my first question: Do we need them?

    The short answer is no. Not legally.

    But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them or keep them, as professionals and learners. Portfolios are a good way of collating experiences, celebrating successes, recording failures, and building a collection of your career as a teacher. They provide you with opportunities to reflect, question, and develop your own skills as a learner, and when done well, can be incredibly insightful and important to the practise of teaching.

    The long answer is yes. Yes definitely.

    But… but…. but they make so much more work! Yes. You’re right. But there are two things I say to that.

    Firstly: There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.

    Secondly: Make the portfolio work for you, not you work for it.

    I have several ways of doing this which I plan on sharing over the course of the next few months. This is because I believe there are ways to make them easier to create and collect. I also believe they are worth maintaining even though they are not required legally. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother writing about this now when there is a chance that schools will start dropping the expectation that teachers maintain them. I believe that even if my school dropped them as a requirement, that I would still continue to collect and reflect on my teaching practise in the form of a portfolio.

  • The Foundation: A Line in the Sand

    Draw a Line in the Sand

    It is incredibly important that when we talk about relationships, we talk about them in a purely professional sense. There have been far too many children who have suffered because their relationship with their teacher became more than professional. Keep yourself personally safe. To do this, you have to make some boundaries for yourself, and stick with them.

    1. Children are your students, not your friends.
      You need to build a relationship with them, that doesn’t mean you have to be their friend. You can be likeable, you can be funny. You can be there for them when they need you to be, but there’s no need to accept an invite to their birthday party or play on the swings with them after school.
      Draw that line in the sand.
    2. Teachers are their teachers, not their friends.
      You are their teacher, not their friend. They might like you as a person, but your job is not to be liked – it is to teach. Don’t let the guise of “friendship” stop you from keeping them accountable or making the hard call to follow consequences or make them do the hard work.
      I often get students saying “Sup Mr…”. I tell them they can say “Sup” to their friends. Not to me. I’m not their friend. At this I usually get a stink face or a “Awww sad” in reply. I follow it with “I’m your teacher”.
      Draw that line in the sand.
    3. Personal Cellphone is your personal cellphone. 
      Don’t share your personal number or other details with students. Too many teachers I’ve seen got caught up with this. It’s just not worth it. This also applies to all other forms of communication, including social media, personal emails, etc…
      Draw that line in the sand.
    4. Your class is more than one student.
      Never get into a situation where you are solely focussed on one student. You have a responsibility to the others. This will hopefully stop you from having favourites. It will also stop you from getting into one on one situations which could lead to trouble. Always have more than one student in a room with you, or have open windows for all to see (for one on one testing for example). Simple.
      Draw that line in the sand.

     

  • Understanding the Teacher Crisis

    The Side Eye: Everything to Everyone – understanding the teacher crisis:

    A unique take on the Teacher Crisis put into a visual narrative succinctly and accurately by Toby Morris.

    Be sure to check it out over at The Spinoff – The Side Eye.

    For the rest of the story, please head over to the original article here.

    https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/the-side-eye/03-12-2018/the-side-eye-everything-to-everyone-understanding-the-teacher-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR04F0_Wj102NUYIFSY1Th7SJhbX99I83ZLJJwidKkSEwdKfAnvlkLkycqY

  • Striking Teachers: Win or Lose?

    While a resounding cheer went up at ‘The Stadium’ when given the option of striking for two days, numerous teachers looked at each other and shook their heads. Minutes before we were told of two possible further actions, one that made no sense, and another which was striking for two days. ‘Now shout for which you want…’ Needless to say, without the clarity of thought or time to process either option, the cheer was for the less confusing option.

    Crowd mentality.

    However, the last thing teachers need is the voice of an Auckland principal speaking for the profession like he owns the place.

    His words come from a place of self imposed importance. He’s welcome to his opinion though. So we’ll just make a few notes here.

    Alwyn Poole, all alone in a dimly lit corridor, putting up a folded arm barrier between him and the teaching profession.

    “The current collective agreement round for teachers takes us back to the 1970s, and teachers and their unions (with the approval of their members) are screwing this up very, very badly. They have already lost even if they “win”.

    They have attempted to frame this as a solution to the apparent shortage of teachers. If so, they should provide researched evidence that an increase in pay will solve the problem,  not anecdotes from whingeing 25-year-olds complaining about their chosen career.

    If New Zealand is to avoid a genuine crisis in education provision for our young people in the near future, a few things need to happen. As a start, the bar to entry for primary school teaching needs to go much higher in terms of prerequisite qualifications in maths, science and English. Lift the entry requirements and create a genuine bar for aspiring teachers to strive for, thus lifting the intake quality and enhancing the reputation of the profession in the eyes of Kiwi families.”

    – Alwyn Poole, Stuff, August 2018

    Where do we start. Firstly, don’t discriminate based on age. These 25 year olds are the future teachers we’re trying to keep in the job. And if they’re complaining, you can bet your bottom dollar, the rest of us have been complaining and have given up.

    Secondly, raising the bar for entry to primary school teacher training isn’t the answer. As it is, when I trained in the late 2000’s, I was required to maintain a B average across all subjects of my degree. I’ve met some very smart people, with copious degrees, who I wouldn’t want (and who wouldn’t survive) in front of a class. Similarly, I know some people who would make incredible teachers, but whom aren’t academically motivated or interested in pursuing the career because of the university requirements. Kiwi families aren’t asking for smart teachers. They just want good teachers to be the best for their kids. Aspiring teachers shouldn’t need to strive academically for the thing that they know they were born to do. Furthermore, I’m not sure anything I learned in tertiary education (in terms of my Bachelor of Arts) has ever come in useful in my Year 5/6 Primary school classroom. Just saying…

    Alwyn goes on… and on…

    “Teachers and their unions need to stop whingeing about their jobs. Seriously, nowhere else on the planet does a profession have 12-14 holiday weeks a year. If you have to do some work in those holidays – woolly-boolly – you still have huge choices about how you go about that while in Fiji or Bali.

    Stop complaining about the greatest job in the world: working with young people for the good of their future. Have teachers even considered that the children might be just a little upset that they are regarded as a burden and a chore, and that the normal things that go with teaching require a little extra work? How on earth does all this moaning and complaining inspire the next generation into this amazing career? It doesn’t. The unions are making it embarrassing to want to be a teacher.”

    Seriously? How much were you paid to say this Alwyn?

    You are right… though you used the word ‘else’ incorrectly in that sentence. No where on the planet does a profession have 12-14 holiday weeks a year. Not even in teaching. Seriously. As a principal, with experience, I would have thought you’d know this. Teachers work in their holidays, constantly. They work, it’s just that they don’t have 30 children around them at the time – which is the same as a normal day of work for most New Zealanders!

    Obviously principals are getting paid too much if they’re taking holidays to Fiji and Bali all the time. Not sure I’ve ever had the chance in my nine years of teaching, nor can imagine taking work with me if I did.

    I guess if we all only had 15 students in our class (as is the case for Alwyn and his staff), we might not have to work as much during the holidays. That’s right… Alwyn is a principal of two charter schools in Auckland, and his schools only have 48 students and 180 students in them. Both have the same website and school logo design. Brilliant.

     

    I mean, let’s look at other professions that might be more appealing. Doctor? Lawyer? ICT?

    All of these have significant pay associated with them. The average wage for a GP is $97,000. Lawyers in large firms around $87K per annum (after four years experience). ICT is a wide field of possible jobs, but an IT Manager gets between $90-$130K each year.

    In comparison, the average primary school teacher gets $56K. I continually tell people, you don’t become a teacher for the pay. Nor should you. But come on. How are you meant to suggest that anyone take that kind of pay for this kind of job, and expect words like ‘love’ and ‘passion’ to pick up the slack?

    Shirley Maihi, showing what teaching is actually about – arms wrapped in aroha for the kids

    In response, this was written by Shirley Maihi, a decile 1 principal from South Auckland.

    “In a column published on Stuff on Tuesday, Mt Hobson Middle School principal Alwyn Poole said in focusing negotiations on pay, teachers and unions were “screwing this up very, very badly“.

    Responding to this, Maihi said the demands for a pay increase were “absolutely right”.

    When teachers’ pay competed with other sectors in the past, people were attracted to the profession, she said – New Zealand needed to get back to that point.

    “It’s impossible to get staff,” she said. She has been advertising for one position since November and is yet to get a single applicant. Two other vacancies also lie dormant.

    This only made teachers’ lives more stressful, she said. If a class had to be split when no relievers could be found, teachers might end up with five or six extra kids in their class.

    This was on top of a workload that already caused “huge mental stress”, Maihi said.

    Teachers spent much of their time dealing with social issues before they could even get to delivering an education, she said.

    A teacher could not expect to start the year with 25 students and see the same 25 children at the end, so a lot of time was spent resettling children and getting them ready to learn.

    That’s before the extra time they spent pouring into sports, study centres and after school care, and the hours spent working in the evenings.

    As for holidays, she scoffed at Poole’s suggestion that if teachers had to work in the holidays “you still have huge choices about how you go about that while in Fiji or Bali”.

    “Most of my teachers are trying to pay mortgages or living expenses,” she said. “They’re not going abroad.”

    For most teachers, time away from school was an opportunity for family time that was sorely missed during term time, she said.

    And – yes – for work.

    “‘Holidays’ – in inverted commas – are not holidays.”

    Finlayson Park ran its professional development courses in the first week of mid-year holidays, and the second week was spent preparing and setting up the classroom. Teachers might have a day or two to do shopping, but that was about it, Maihi said.

    Over the summer break, she encouraged staff to take four weeks away from school work.

    “Most other professions get four weeks off – so do we.”

    – Shirley Maihi, Stuff, August 2018

    Pretty much sums it up I think. The two photos featured above speak volumes. I know which I would rather work for.

  • Teacher Back to School Bingo – 2018 Edition

    Last year’s Bingo was such a success that it seemed only right that a new edition for 2018 comes out. Of course, these are largely generic, and last year’s sheet is still playable. Remember, this is nothing more but to have a bit of fun to make those first days back at work a little more bearable. So here it is, the annual Teacher’s Back to School Bingo.

    Have fun as you go back to school!

  • Survey says teachers’ mental health declining

    Original article: Survey says teachers’ mental health declining

    A long list of anxieties — around school budget cuts, bullying, coarse political discourse and the shaky status of immigrant students — is taking a toll on teachers, a new survey shows, with more educators now saying their mental health is suffering than just two years earlier.

    More than half of the educators point out their mental health is an issue: 58% said their mental health was “not good” for seven or more of the previous 30 days. A similar survey in 2015 found just 34% of respondents felt the same.

    The findings are being released Monday by the American Federation of Teachers  and the Badass Teachers Association,   a national grass-roots organization focused on social justice.

    Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ federation, said that over the past few years, teachers have actually swapped one kind of stress — an intense national focus on standardized skills tests — for another.

    After President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Weingarten said, many observers believed that educator stress would ease. “You would have expected the numbers to go down, not up,” she said.

    But stress over the coarseness of our political debate, she said, has become a big dilemma for schools, she said.

    “This notion that being coarse and tough and enabling hate is OK is highly, highly, highly disruptive and problematic in schools and goes completely against what parents and teachers know is absolutely important for kids, which is a safe and welcoming environment,” Weingarten said in an interview.

    The survey of nearly 5,000 educators, most of them responding online, found that the vast majority — 86% — did not feel respected by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has made expanding private- and charter-school choice a centerpiece of her career.

    Read more here.

    Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/30/survey-teachers-mental-health-declining-amid-job-stress/811577001/

  • 10 Things I Wish I Knew My First Year Of Teaching

    Original article by Terry Heick on TeachThought

    My first year of teaching was a blur.

    At the time, it didn’t feel like a blur. It felt a joyous, adrenaline-fueled rush of lessons, meetings, and new relationships. But in hindsight, it was definitely a blur. And now, years later, I can see a few simple tweaks would’ve gone a long way.

    1. Prioritize—and then prioritize again.

    You can’t do it all. You can’t save everyone. You can’t change the world, your school, department, or even (the entirety of) your classroom in one year.

    If I’d have known that, I’d have started with what I absolutely had to get done, and worked backwards from there.

    2. It’s not your classroom.

    It felt like my classroom. Name on the doorway, students coming to my room, my name on the rotation for bus duty, district walkthroughs holding me accountable.

    Philosophically, it was really more the classroom for the students, but even that isn’t entirely correct. It’s really the state or district’s classroom. At the end of the day, in lieu of all of your training, development, and instincts, your job—or my job, rather—was to implement the school and district’s policies to the best of my ability while leading the students to mastery of the national standards.

    Not endearing, but true.

    That doesn’t mean you can’t–or aren’t expected to–do all that you can to provide a compelling and progressive learning experience for your students, but if pursuit of that started to collide with school and district “non-negotiables”–as it often did–that perspective would’ve helped.

    It wouldn’t have dismissed me from personal or professional accountability, but it’d have helped me internalize that friction much more fluidly.

    3. Students won’t always remember the content, but many will never forget how you made them feel.

    One day, you’ll just be the blurry face in an adult’s memory. They’ll likely not remember how a poet used symbolism to establish a harsh tone in a poem, and they may not remember you, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel about themselves.

    4. Get cozy with the school custodians, secretary, librarian.

    You’ll need them.

    5. Longer hours isn’t sustainable.

    Change your habits and workflow instead. But you couldn’t have convinced me. All the teachers I saw lugged papers and gradebooks with them everywhere, so I thought I had to as well. Silly me.

    6. Student behavior is a product.

    Classroom management is more about the design of learning experiences than it is behavior. I was given several trainings in the school “classroom management system,” but didn’t understand that “behavior” was almost always a product of the way I designed learning experiences mixed with my relationship with the students.

    That’d have been nice to know.

    7. Don’t get sucked into doing too much outside of your class.

    But if you feel the need to be involved, do so with both feet. I did the best I could with Academic Team my first year of teaching, but in reality, the students deserved ten times the support I gave them.

    8. Help other teachers.

    Because you’re going to need them. So much is beyond your control, and it is your relationship with your colleagues that will sustain you when you’re behind or confused. I focused so much on curriculum, instruction, and the students themselves that I neglected this part.

    If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

    9. Reaching students emotionally matters. A lot.

    Relationships start with being authentic to students and helping them to feel understood–not respect, clear rules, and seating arrangements. Yay for having things completely backwards!

    10. Literacy is everything for academic performance.

    If students struggle reading and writing, everything else is a challenge.

    Read original article here.

    Source: https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/10-things-i-wish-i-knew-my-first-year-of-teaching/

  • 5 ways teachers can challenge inequality in the classroom

    Research shows that everyday teaching practices exclude already marginalised groups of students, but teachers can take steps to redress the balance.

    Schools produce inequality. Work carried out by educational sociologists such as Kalwant Bhopal, David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell shows that the everyday practices of teaching and learning exclude already marginalised groups of students while guaranteeing success for others.

    My own research found that in a climate where teachers are under extreme pressure to produce results, practices such as ability setting, continual student assessments, shaming behaviour management approaches and short-hand descriptors of students – such as “low ability” or “SEN” – are commonplace. Students who are already part of minority groups in society – for instance, due to race, class, gender or a disability – are disproportionately represented in so-called low ability groups; often score below average in tests (because of the system rather than the students); and are frequently misrepresented or underrepresented in curriculum material presented in class.

    So how can we address educational inequalities from inside the classroom? I spent a year working as a class teacher to find out – observing and recording what happened when I attempted to intervene in the production of inequalities in my primary school classroom. Here are some different approaches I explored, which teachers could try in their own schools.

    Rethink ability grouping

    Is ability grouping necessary? Try different ways of organising groups of students in the classroom. Rather than creating separate activities based on a preconceived idea of ability, students could work through tasks with differing levels of challenge. This allows them to think about what they can achieve and does not label anyone incapable.

    Try providing more open-ended activities that require the students to problem-solve and draw on a range of skills. For example, see if they can make a tower strong enough to hold a marble with a given set of materials, or invite students to plan a class party that needs invitations, decorations and food.

    Allow them to work together – one student may be good at writing while another may be more creative. Students can support each other and surprise themselves and you. Sometimes they will all be given the same task and will produce something different from it (writing stories of different lengths and complexities, for example). The important thing is not to predetermine what students can achieve before they have started.

    Check your language

    Interrogate the language you use to describe your pupils and the language used by students themselves in the classroom. Nobody is inherently low ability, discourses of “boys will be boys” or “hardworking, helpful girls” limit everyone in the class, as do ideas about “lads” and “bitchy girls” – such double standards need challenging.

    Some students still use the term “gay” to describe something negative, which can cause those exploring their own sexuality or who come from queer families to feel unsafe. Using labels such as “naughty” or “silly” to describe pupils, even if not used in front of the students themselves, can quickly stick and alter how students are perceived.

    Make the curriculum relevant

    Who decides the curriculum? Is it representative of the students in the class, reflecting their experiences, histories and questions? It isn’t possible to make the curriculum relevant to all of the students all the time, but consider asking them what they would like to learn about. When I did this with the class of six- and seven-year-olds, we planned out a whole term of activities around the topic of babies, through film, writing and other activities – linking together subjects across the curriculum, and reflecting some of the students’ own experiences.

    Where it’s not possible to alter curriculum material, critical conversations could be started around the points of view represented in lessons from history, science or literature. I’ve changed my questioning to encourage students to think about whose point of view we are hearing. For example, drawing children’s attention to the gender of scientists and suggesting they find out about female scientists; or when we learn about kings and queens, who are we not learning about? – if school resources show only white people in Tudor times, for instance, encourage students to ask questions about why people of colour are not represented.

    Avoid quick-fix punishments

    Many behaviour management systems in schools are incredibly shaming for students. Having your name written under a sad face, being made to stand up during assembly, or being asked to sit on the floor in another classroom, are publicly humiliating practices that would seem shocking if carried out in an adult place of work.

    Such practices are a quick fix in a busy school day but, in the long run, rarely result in behavioural changes from a student. Consider where space could be opened up for conversation rather than punishment. Can the language around bad behaviour be challenged to make room for more compassionate understanding of students who don’t so easily conform?

    Nurture relationships

    Ultimately, all of these methods aim to help prioritise teacher-student relationships and the relationships between students in the classroom. It’s these relationships that allow the student to be seen as a person, as opposed to, for instance, a middle-ability child.

    When we connect with the students in front of us by respecting them as people, listening to their point of view, acknowledging their difficulties and acting from a place of compassion, we end up being able to critique the assessments the students take, rather than the students themselves. It is from here that we build a classroom, a school and an education system that is more inclusive of everyone.

  • Backbench MP’s vs. Teacher Salaries

    Backbench MPs are about to earn $163,961 a year. The top of the pay scale for teachers is $78,000.
    If we turn the pay clock back to 1979, Backbenchers and experienced teachers earned roughly the same amount ($18,000 a year) Now the basic MP’s salary is more than twice as much as what a senior teacher earns.

    Auckland schools are desperate for teachers but, even as she was preparing to leave parliament, former Education Minister Hekia Parata was quoted last March as saying :

    “Teachers, like other Aucklanders – police, nurses, bus drivers – are facing the same pressures. And I don’t think one group over another should get some kind of different funding” (Herald March 19,2017)

    Apparently, however, it is OK for the particular group to which she once belonged (MPs) to get “some kind of different funding, ” …the ongoing perks of which she will enjoy for many years to come.

    This is what neoliberal economics has done to us folks – lowered wages while allowing house and food prices to rise. And those who have championed this kind of unfair economic policy in parliament for the last 30 years have feathered their own nests in the process.

    Did we vote for a fairer government this time?

    Who would know?

    We are in limbo.

    Perhaps if pay cuts for MPs and more money for caregivers, teachers, nurses,mental health workers ( for example ) was on the negotiating table I’d feel more hopeful.

    PS. By the way you can find links to my latest documentary WHO OWNS NEW ZEALAND NOW? and extended interviews here: https://www.facebook.com/NZHousing

    Amongst other things,it looks at how houses became overpriced in terms of what we earn.

  • Future of education in NZ for National freightrain

    In response to NZ Herald – Every child’s chance to learn second language: National’s education policy – 27 August 2017.

    Whilst some schools are struggling to get students to learn a first language, we’ll be teaching them coding and a second language as well should National get through to it’s fourth consecutive term.

    National Standards will be extended.

    And low and behold, surprise, surprise, they will be pumping money into improving the teaching of maths to primary schools.

    Seriously. When will they get the message?

    The second part of the package was a $126 million investment to raise maths achievement for primary school students. English said National Standards showed New Zealand needed to lift its game in maths. “So we’ll provide our students and teachers with the tools they need to do that… We’ll help 1200 teachers a year complete extra university papers targeted at teaching maths to primary students… We’ll also provide intensive classroom support for students, where schools have identified the need to improve their maths.”

    Obviously teachers are the reason students aren’t achieving in Mathematics. Rubbish teachers and ineffective teaching. Ignore the fact that there are other factors at play for many students, it MUST be the useless teachers we have that are failing our students.

    So to fix this problem, we’ll send teachers back to university to learn how to teach Mathematics more effectively by ex-teachers-turn-lecturers who couldn’t hack it in the classroom 15 years ago with some kind of trendy fad way of teaching. Probably after school, in teacher’s own time.

    Teachers work out of their skin. Anyone who has visited schools that are supposedly ‘struggling’ knows that there are other factors in any underachievement.

    It’s made even more a joke when you begin to look at the reason behind such a policy. A simple search on our favourite search engine shows that Education Counts has the data for National Standards Results, 2016 (PDF). On the very first graph of this document we see that Reading sits at 77.8%, Maths at 75.4% and 71.2% for Writing. So why are we targeting Maths?

    Quite simple actually.

    Maths is the easiest to address. It has a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’. It’s measurable. It’s quantifiable. It’s the easiest to show progress. It’s assessments are stable and data rich. This is something that Reading and Writing don’t have, being largely subjective – especially Writing. The government want to ride on some success. By investing in Mathematics and measuring the future success of their education budget, they can prove that National Standards work, and legitimise all three subjects.

    However, what teachers really want, and really need, are some resources, assessments, and some structure around how Writing is assessed and taught, and to see how this can impact on all other subjects (including Mathematics). Pumping more money into Mathematics is an easy out for the Government, whilst appearing that they are putting in resources and funding into education before an election, whilst in reality, they are plugging a hole that isn’t leaking (or not leaking as much).

    Are any teacher’s actually excited about this? About having more money put into Mathematics, even after ALiM and other initiatives? About the prospect of having to go back to complete some additional university papers?