Teachers Under Pressure

Maurice Galton, John MacBeath

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781847873224, 9781847873217
• eBook ISBN: 9781446245347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

`This is a well written and thoroughly researched book on an issue of vital importance. It places the experiences of individual teachers under pressure into the larger UK and worldwide context. Policy makers need to wake up to its messages? - Sara Bubb, Institute of Education, University of London

What is it really like to be a teacher in today?s demanding classrooms?

Maurice Galton and John MacBeath spoke to teachers, parents and students in England, and compared their responses to similar inquiries in Asia, America, Australia and New Zealand. Their findings were disturbing. Teacher stress and workload were persistent themes in the four studies, with teachers frequently stretched to breaking point as they endeavour to ?make a difference? to their pupils? learning and welfare.

Issues examined in the book include:

- frustrations facing those trying to make inclusive education work in practice

- effects of constantly changing policies on the staff required to implement them

- loss of status within the teaching profession

- reasons for teachers choosing to leave the profession

- the consequences of staying on and fighting for what one believes in

This fascinating read will be of interest to anyone involved in teaching, school leadership and educational policy.

1

Teaching Is Not What It Used to Be

In this first chapter we identify some of the factors that have impacted on teachers’ working lives in recent years both in the UK and elsewhere. While in a more challenging world the teaching impulse has endured, teachers are leaving the profession ‘in unprecedented numbers’ as the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) claims. This, our evidence suggests, is because successive government reforms have succeeded in progressively draining off the enthusiasm and commitment for teaching, so that the greatest professional source of satisfaction – seeing children learn – is progressively undermined by tables, targets and the tyranny of testing.

The end of a golden age?

Teaching is not what it used to be. The brave new world in which schools find themselves is not what it used to be and the lives of children are no longer as innocent as they once were. Yet the teaching impulse has not changed commensurately. Teaching may be tougher, more challenging, requiring greater resilience and tolerance, but the satisfaction derived from watching children learn and grow is still its primary reward. Teachers enter the profession for a variety of motives, sometimes by default, sometimes through a love of their subject, sometimes through a desire to work with children, but it is only when teachers get their first taste of the Eureka moment that teaching becomes an addictive vocation. The teacher of the year 2007, receiving his award from Lord Putnam, confessed to entering teaching in the first place simply to prolong his time at University by taking the PGCE post-graduate teaching qualification (Kingston, 2007). However, once inside the classroom and recognising the awesome responsibility as a powerful agent for change he admitted to being hooked for life.

Yet, teaching is not what it used to be. Not because the impulse to teach has diminished but because teachers now have to deal with pressures qualitatively different than ever before. Since the invention of schooling teachers have had to cope with indisciplined and troubled children and put up with unreasonable demands from government bodies, but the scale, complexity and intensity of pressures on them in the postmodern world are unprecedented.

It may be argued that today’s teachers are less isolated in their classrooms, that they receive more support from their colleagues and senior leaders, that they are less reluctant to share their problems and admit to their failings, yet this is also a double-edged sword. Classrooms are now more transparent and the nature of teaching and learning are open to almost continuous scrutiny. A variety of stakeholders – local authorities, School Improvement Partners, Ofsted inspectors, parents and pupils are encouraged to hold teachers to account for the ‘delivery’ of the curriculum and the perpetual raising of standards. Accountability goes in hand in hand with ‘perverse indicators’ (O‘Neill, 2002), and performance management, performance tables and performance testing tell a story of a system which seems to unable to learn from the mistakes of the past. There is worrying conformation for this from the ongoing Primary Review (2007) whose early findings reveal ‘a pervasive anxiety about specific aspects of recent educational policy’ and cast doubt on the government’s view that the testing regime raises standards. It also begins to paint a picture of the world in which childhood ends too prematurely and children arrive at the school gates knowing too much and not enough.

Teaching has had to rise to the challenge of a world in which the pace, nature and contexts of learning have been radically transformed. Teachers entering the profession today may expect classrooms to be like the ones they attended but although a teaching space may look surprisingly similar on the surface, the quality and dynamics of what happens there are not what they used to be. While the curriculum may have a reassuring familiarity, its value is now measured less in intrinsic terms than as a proxy for a school’s or a teacher’s effectiveness. ‘Delivery’, a word in common usage borrowed from industry and misapplied in a classroom context, places the teacher as intermediary between a body of required knowledge and pupil performance, stripping him or her of the creative and interpretive role that they could play given a degree of latitude, creative diversion and a genuine sense of ownership.

The contemporary world is one in which young people are less and less inclined to be simply at the receiving end of a delivered curriculum. They are growing up faster and with alternative attractions more engaging than what their schools have to offer. Yet, for governments, the solution seems to lie in greater containment, stricter testing regimes and ever-increasing pressure on teachers to prove themselves, against benchmarks, ‘best practice’ and mandated criteria of effectiveness. Teachers are, suggests Day (2000), confused by the loose-tight paradox of local decision-making responsibilities alongside increased public scrutiny and external accountability, leading to what has been described as ‘intensification’. It is captured well in the following extract from a case study of a New York City school.

Nine and a half hour days, class on Saturday, school during the summer and two hours of homework each night are non-negotiable... “If you’re off the bus you’re working,” says Feinberg... “Each morning students receive a worksheet of maths, logic and word problems for them to solve in the free minutes that appear during the day.”

Teachers carry cell phones with toll free numbers and are on call 24 hours a day to answer any concerns their students might have. “Ten calls a night may sound like a drag”, says Feinberg, “but everyone goes to bed ready for the next school day.” (Principal Michael Feinberg, in Carter, 2001:95)

The question it raises is one of sustainability. ‘Burnout’ is a term that has now entered the teaching lexicon as teachers find that they cannot sustain the intensity of investment in teaching and in meeting the needs of their students. For many young people, engaging with the curriculum may come low down in the hierarchy of needs. For many teachers, teaching one’s subject may also assume a lower priority than that of simply finding some emotional stability with troubled young people and establishing some common ground on which to communicate.

This is not a purely British or North American phenomenon. It is equally familiar in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, for example. Shimahara (2003:3) characterises Japanese schools as experiencing ‘the troubled relationship between the children who are the main actors in the educational process and the system itself’. He locates it in systemic factors.

Intensification refers to the loss of autonomy, caused by prescribed programs, mandated curricula, step-by-step methods of instruction combined with pressure to respond to various innovations and diversification of students’ academic and social needs.

However, as Shimahara goes on to discuss, those common global forces play out differently in different cultural contexts. In Japan intensification is seen as coming from within, teachers accepting their lot, what is termed shukumei, a situation not be challenged. Shimahara quotes a teacher:

In our work there is neither beginning nor end because it just continues. It would be best to complete everything at school but it is impossible. I have to bring my work home and spend one or two hours on it every day. (p. 23)

Even a decade ago, as revealed in a study by Fujita (1997), it was found that the majority of Japanese teachers spent at least ten hours in school every day, middle school teachers 11–12 hours, as many as half staying until 8 p.m.

There is a similar stoicism in Hong Kong schools (MacBeath and Clark, 2005) where a powerful normative culture discourages teachers from departing from the mainstream of practice. While in these cultures intensification may be described as ‘self imposed’ it has to be understood as a collective response, deriving from a sense of professional duty.

While in Western cultures there is greater tendency to make one’s complaints heard, it is claimed, at least in the US context, ‘that teachers have operated for so long under this cultural dysfunction that they regulate themselves with their own bureaucratic chains (Troen and Coles, 2004). The authors refer to Foucault’s Panopticon, the all-seeing eye, inducing a state of conscious and constant surveillance which becomes permanent in its effects. In the English context too, in which teachers are more inclined to voice their discontent, we found a great deal of outspoken complaint about policy, pressure and deprofessionalisation, yet at the same time a dutiful compliance to the inevitability of the situation (Galton and MacBeath, 2002; MacBeath and Galton, 2004). Referring to stress in range of occupations, including teaching, Tennant (2001) writes:

The problem of assessing what may be acceptable or unacceptable stress is further confused by virtue of the fact that increasing responsibilities and hours worked are becoming more common in the workplace and thus seem ‘normative’. (p. 702)

While living with intensification often expresses itself simply in resentful resignation, it also results in resignation in a more fundamental sense, in other words, withdrawal from a situation seen as no longer tenable. As various research studies show internationally, teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers. An OECD Education Policy Analysis in 2001 warned of a ‘meltdown scenario’ caused by a growing teacher exodus from the profession. It reported widespread public dissatisfaction with the state of education in the face of a deep teacher-recruitment crisis and a growing sense of declining standards, especially in the worst affected areas. A year later a report by the General Teaching Council in Wales (GTCW, 2002) described the fulfillment of that forecast with one in ten teaching posts remaining unfilled. Its Chief Executive claimed ‘Clearly heads don’t believe they have enough choice of applicants to make the appointments they want... In some cases, they had no choices at all.’

Often the teacher exodus occurs after a short period in post. Ingersoll (2003) describes this as the ‘revolving door syndrome’. Teaching is a profession that loses new recruits very early and schools are, he says, suffering from lack of autonomy and flexibility in addressing pedagogical issues creatively. This resonates with findings from an Australian study (Wilhelm et al., 2000) that has been following a cohort of teachers since 1978. They found that teachers who left did so within the first five years of teaching. If a school provided mechanisms for the protection of academic freedom and for voicing opposition where there was disagreement with school policies, teachers would be less likely to exit. If, however, there were few mechanisms for the collective or individual expression of disagreement and few protections for those who challenged state or school or policies, dissenting teachers were more likely to exit.

The consequent danger is that by draining off dissent, the vitality, scope and diversity of the organisation is potentially diminished. There is a substantive body of evidence to suggest that compliance stifles creativity and initiative and that consensus can close down creative alternatives (Surowiecki, 2004).

In the US context, Susan Moore Johnson (2004) writes that teaching is no longer a career for life, no longer for first career entrants prepared for the job in traditional ways, operating privately and autonomously in their own classrooms. Between 24 and 40 per cent of teachers in her study, depending on the state or city of their recruitment, were mid-career entrants. Those who came from industry looked for opportunities to work in teams and to have expanded influence. The ‘hole in the bucket’ inflow and outflow of staff is, she argues, an expression of a shifting socio-economic situation that is unlikely to be attenuated without a quality of leadership willing to attend to the changing expectations that teachers bring with them – in Andy Hargreaves (2005) words ‘reading the tea leaves’.

The combination of rapid change and timidity of response by policy makers calls for a quality of leadership, able to ‘resist the juggernaut’ (Frost, 2005), strong enough to maintain an educational vision with moral integrity and intellectual subversion. Ironically, the recruitment and retention ‘crisis’ impacts most acutely on school leadership.

Williams’ (2001) Canadian study of recruitment to principalship listed 22 ‘dissatisfiers’, many of which find an echo in other national studies. While the reference here is to principalship/headship these same dissatisfiers appear to apply at all levels within the teaching profession.

Stress

Stress is one of the strongest recurring themes in the literature, its source lying in constant change and the changing nature of the job. In Canada, Leithwood (www.oise.utoronto.ca/orbit/school_leader) reported a rise in stress levels ‘considerably exaggerated over the past two years in Ontario as a consequence of the speed with which policy changes have been introduced’. Decentralisation and the competitive nature of a market economy bring with them a need to work harder, more demanding hours and in face of progressively higher stakes. Much of the stress is explained in terms of principals/head teachers having more responsibilities than power (Thomson et al., 2003), carrying on their own shoulders responsibility for the success or failure of their schools, and delivering success, in the currency of test scores within a prescribed period and in a turbulent socio-economic context, where few things stand still enough to be measured.

Stress may be just as acute in the case of teachers. As it is highly correlated with the amount of control one has over decision-making (Martin, 1997), its effects may be felt most profoundly among staff who see themselves caught between a highly prescriptive agenda and a room full of young people who need to be coerced and cajoled into engaging with the matter at hand. Stress is not unique to teaching. It is experienced among a wide range of professions but there is a form of stress for many classroom teachers that teachers describe as distinctive, debilitating and demoralising. This was a continuous theme in our own tripartite studies of primary, secondary and special schools which provide the content for this boo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Teaching is not what it used to be
• Chapter 2: Balancing the workload equation: A continuing story
• Chapter 3: A life in teaching: The primary teacher’s experience?
• Chapter 4: Remodelling the primary teaching workforce
• Chapter 5: A life in secondary teaching
• Chapter 6: The inclusion enigma: The policy context
• Chapter 7: The inclusion enigma findings and implications of the study
• Chapter 8: Workload agreements and the rise of the teaching assistant
• Chapter 9: It’s the same the whole world over: What happens in other countries?
• Chapter 10: Remodelling: Structures or mindset?
• References
• Index