Schools need reform, not just cutting of costs

THIS WEEK, I was talking to someone whose job takes him into schools all over Leinster. He talked about the glazed look that teachers have now, and compared it to what you might see on the faces of doctors and nurses in an overcrowded emergency ward. He talked about the air of barely contained stress teachers exude as they rush from place to place. He suggested it was a profession on the verge of mass burnout.

I know exactly what he is talking about, but glumly await the deluge of abusive e-mails that will follow that opening paragraph. Anna Quindlen, the American author and commentator, once wrote a column for Newsweekin which she suggested teaching is the toughest job there is. I am not suggesting that for a minute.

Being out of work with a mortgage to pay and children to rear beats the stress of teaching every time. Being a social worker who deals with children in care would turn me into a blubbering wreck in a week. I wouldn’t last an afternoon in one of those emergency wards.

But Quindlen, who taught the occasional class herself and had to go home to lie down on the floor afterwards, stuck to her guns. For her, teaching was the toughest and most important job, because “it involved being a gardener of the landscape of the human race”.

The teaching council puts it less poetically. “Teachers are committed to a holistic vision of education which includes the aesthetic, cognitive, intellectual, critical, cultural, emotional, imaginative, creative, moral, social, political, spiritual, physical and healthy development of their students.”

Quite. And you thought we were just teaching them algebra and where to put an apostrophe.

There have been a number of leaks in recent times concerning reform of the Junior Cycle. Believe it or not, the people who are most aware of the need for reform are teachers themselves. Parents tend to be much more conservative, to rely on the “divil you know”.

However, teachers are also deeply cynical about the motivation for reform at this point. And the way in which leaks happened in recent weeks only serves to deepen that cynicism.

Some background for those not in the trenches: the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has been toiling for years to formulate a reasonable timeframe and structure for reform at second-level. Ministers have arrogantly rebuffed their efforts.

Teachers might query some aspects of the proposed reform, such as too much reliance on project work and in-school assessment, but they see a lot of thoughtful preparation has gone into the proposals.

But when the NCCA proposals were leaked, they came bundled with a suggestion first mooted in the summer. It is unworkable, and displays quite stunning ignorance of how schools operate. The NCCA must be horrified.

I refer to the farcical suggestion that instead of proper, phased reform, which would move from an exam-based system to student-focused learning over several years, students will sit Junior Cert exams in only eight subjects from next September.

Worried parents of children now in sixth class are ringing schools to find out what this means. Principals are forced to tell them they have no idea, because no guidance as to how to achieve this has been issued.

Will students choose to sit exams in eight subjects, but continue to study 10 or 11? Will you have some subjects where some students are exam-focused and others are along for the ride? Worse, will some subjects be relegated to second tier, or disappear altogether?

Passionate articles are being written in favour of subjects such as history, as people see them as at most risk if only eight subjects are to be studied for exams. In fact, no one knows what these proposals actually mean.

The system needs reform. Too much focus on exams leads to excluding everything that will not eventually result in points, to a “notes and grinds” culture, and to the death of original and independent thinking.

But what is proposed for next September is not reform but a cynical cost-cutting exercise. If carried out, it will cause such disruption in schools that a great deal of goodwill towards genuine change will disappear.

You cannot move from an exam-focused system to a more holistic approach overnight. Teachers will need support and retraining. Parents will need persuasion the new system will produce a better result. Students will need coaching to move from a passive “feed me with a spoon” approach to actively learning themselves. All of this demands substantial resources.

It seems inevitable that the pupil-teacher ratio will also be raised. For people outside the profession, it sounds no more significant than putting an extra desk and chair into a classroom. Those within know it means the Department of Education will sanction fewer teaching hours at second level.

This means in practice that schools will no longer be able to offer some subjects, as there will not be enough teachers. Subjects such as music, art and some languages, which often had smaller numbers taking them, will be most at risk.

If only, if only, we had begun reform when there was money in the country. Now, we are attempting it when we are being told there is no money for anything. Already, cutbacks mean key services for students are being eroded.

No wonder teachers are grey in the face with stress.