With all due respect to the PM, I hope his ‘benign advice’ meets with widespread resistance from secondary leaders and maths teachers.

Maths is a vital subject, of course. We should teach it – arithmetic, especially – as well as possible, for as long as possible. However, any suggestion that maths is somehow ‘superior’ to the rest of the curriculum is misplaced.

The jewel in our educational crown is the solemn promise we make to sixth-formers that we will honour the subject choices they make that best suit their talents. Teachers should never be asked to break that promise.

Hearts and minds

The late Sir Ken Robinson spoke eloquently about the way in which intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct. Countless educators admire his ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ TED talk for a reason. His message was a simple, yet profound one. It was that we should nurture students’ imaginations and let dancers be dancers, musicians be musicians and artists be artists.

Listening to both the hearts and minds of teenagers is a crucial pedagogical skill; we don’t just function from the neck upwards.

When we respect teenagers for who they are and what they might one day become, what you’ll often find is that they manage to forge their own pathways to happiness and success. As Oscar Wilde once sagely advised, ‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken.’

As things currently stand, we typically teach school students maths in some capacity virtually every day for a span of 11 years. If, after that much time and combined effort, a child still doesn’t secure a 4 or 5 in their GCSE maths exams, we should perhaps accept that forcing them to acquire higher maths skills regardless could significantly distract them from the more specialised studies they’ll be moving on to.

Let’s not blame maths teachers or students for those GCSE failings, as to do so would be unfair. Most teenagers wouldn’t see themselves as ‘anti-maths’, or indeed ‘pro maths’. They likely aren’t clamouring for opportunities to study further maths.

If it’s the case that a student simply doesn’t find maths as enjoyable a subject as drama, art, history, music or politics, that’s simply a preference – not a crime.

Maths until 18 and prejudice

Instead, why can’t we recognise and celebrate the sheer diversity of our collective teenage talents? I’d argue that doing this could even be crucial for our efforts at maintaining a vibrant democracy.

Many years ago, I taught RE to a rare, bona fide philosophical genius in Y11. She went on to became the school’s head girl. The sole blight on her otherwise stellar CV was a lower-set placing in maths.

“Why can’t we recognise and celebrate the sheer diversity of our collective teenage talents?”

As brilliant as she evidently was, neither she nor anyone else could quite understood why she struggled as much as she did with maths. She was an archetypal overachiever, but one who worked hard for an overall ‘D’ grade in maths that she was deeply ashamed of. She would frequently punish herself for her ‘failures’ by refusing food.

At the heart of every prejudice lies reductionism. It’s ignorance that compels some people to reduce others to little more than their sexuality, race, age, colour, ethnicity or religion, or any other personal quality. My fear is that insisting on teaching post-16 maths to everyone amounts to naked prejudice, rather than positive discrimination.

Why focus on what teenagers don’t excel at, rather than fostering their unique talents?

Early excitement

We don’t need to be skilled mathematicians to make our mark in life. Even if we insist that every student studies maths to 18, those who barely scrape through their GCSE exams will rarely become A Level maths hotshots. We don’t usually excel at subjects we hate.

I believe Mr Sunak is staring into the wrong end of the telescope. Aristotle was recorded as saying, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man’. We need to focus far more on exciting our primary school children in maths earlier on, so here’s a thought. Why not enlist a major media company or two and task them with creating a popular superhero who solves global problems with their advanced maths skills?

Well, I’ve calculated my angles and can’t wait to pitch my own ‘Fraction Man’ creation to Mr Sunak and assorted Disney executives…

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher. He now serves as a foundation governor while running a tutoring service. He’s the author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95). Find out more at prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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Anyone regularly following today’s increasingly polarised news media – including our students – must learn to distinguish between spins of commission and omission.

My hair conditioner is supposedly ‘seven times more moisturising’ than other leading brands. My jar of coffee provides ‘210 cups’ (albeit thimble‐sizes ones, presumably).

A recent university lecture revealed that during the protracted miners’ strikes of the 1980s, the BBC came under pressure from Downing Street and duly highlighted every instance of miners opting to return to work. It was left to Channel 4 News to tell us how many miners were actually joining the strikes.

Inflammatory rhetoric

In the here and now, nurses were recently offered a taxable rise of £1,300 – but if they’ll be expected to pay £1,200 on newly reintroduced annual parking fees, doesn’t that amount to a pay cut?

LBC radio presenter James O’Brien recently examined how certain tabloids spun particular stories concerning the Royals. During her pregnancy, pictures of Kate Middleton touching her bump were accompanied by reports approving of her ‘maternal instincts’. When Meghan Markle did the same, it became ‘attention‐seeking behaviour’ deemed worthy of excoriating character analyses by the same paper’s resident psychologist.

Over a further 29 examples, O’Brien showed how stories would be routinely spun to present Markle as the wicked witch of a media-created pantomime.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the national press will regularly and ruthlessly expose the perceived professional and personal failures of teachers across the country, but these often won’t constitute factual news. Rather, they’re intended to provoke readers’ suspicions of rampant ‘wokery’, and in the worst cases, amount to straight-up inflammatory rhetoric.

Twisted words

Our schools should be obligated to teach teens media literacy. When we imply that all news is reported objectively, we effectively do the opposite of educating.

Tomorrow’s judges, journalists, politicians and, yes, teachers can be found sitting in today’s classrooms. It’s imperative that we teach children the importance of compassion, justice, integrity and honesty. Our primary responsibility isn’t to be ‘politically correct’, but to be as morally, factually, and contextually correct as possible.

Similarly, I find myself longing for media outlets willing to act as proud and truthful voices for the otherwise unheard. When powerful figures seek to oppress the innocent and powerless, I take solace and inspiration from seeing people I admire courageously challenging those forces.

Honest educators will rarely, if ever, speak from explicitly ‘left’ or ‘right’ perspectives because they know full well that right and wrong are seldom the sole preserve of either side.

The finest teacher I ever had, Mr. Wright, once taught me how ‘twisted words’ are the most effective weapons of mass destruction that modern societies have ever seen. Alas, he was later ‘invited to retire’ after connecting the ‘rape of Africa’ (his words) to the greed and wealth of the British Empire, which prompted a parent to complain.

Mr Wright consistently refused to sanitise the extent of man’s inhumanity to man, but at the same time he never deployed the term ‘white privilege’. Nor did he ever encourage hatred of any kind, though he did insist upon on students digging deep for objective facts.

History, he insisted, is often ‘his story’ – that is, thoroughly spun stories detailing the exploits of male exploiters. As wonderful as Google may be, it remains abundantly clear that we still need teachers driven by a passion for relaying important truths to help us spot the googlies that seek to deceive us.

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor while running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); find out more at prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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Forgive me for not addressing you by name, but by the time this piece appears, will you still be in situ? These are turbulent times, after all. Still, that at least means that the directness of what follows isn’t directed at you personally. My intention is always to help, not harm…

However your political stature might have been publicly measured up to now, be aware that you’ve entered a minefield about which you likely know very little, so tread carefully and with humility.

Our political system has granted you immense power, yet the authority you need to genuinely succeed can only be acquired from the learned educators you serve.

Skilled teachers know how to manage children, classrooms, schools and curricula. What they require from you is the authorisation to deliver programmes that will enrich the lives of the families they serve. Remind yourself daily that these remarkable people have forgotten more about education than you’ll ever know. If you don’t listen to them, you’ll have no advantage over those who can’t hear.

Hard facts

Teachers need a ‘defender of the faith’ rather than a critic. Sadly, however, we all saw how just a few weeks into the job, your immediate predecessor lambasted education leaders for ‘Hanging on to mediocrity,’ telling them that they needed ‘Constant monitoring and pressurising to drive education forward.’

This polemic was unsubstantiated, disingenuous, and above all, alienating. A Minister of the Crown should appreciate that niceness trumps nastiness every time. Teachers know perfectly well and accept that they’re public servants – as indeed are you – but they refuse to be treated as doltish slaves, subject to ‘whip cracking’ ministerial edicts. Respect is a two-way street.

Remember, it wasn’t just the NHS that helped the nation weather the pandemic; teachers are frontline workers too. Educators worked hard to keep youngsters’ learning unbroken and their spirits intact when schools were closed to most, and continued to do so after a clumsy algorithm was ineptly brought in to assess their academic worth.

As the Japanese proverb puts it, a day spent with a great teacher is worth a thousand hours of diligent study. Your primary task is to form teams of first-class teachers who will tell you stark educational truths, regardless of what non-teaching advisors might say.

We can refuse to face hard facts, but they won’t go away – they’ll only become harder to deal with the longer we leave them. We all achieve more when we work as a team.

Best selves

The best way you have of contributing positively to the nation’s education is to ignore any impulses to re-invent wheels. Instead, prioritise tweaks and steady progression. Radical changes might generate headlines, but too often they merely deliver illusions of real progress.

Also, look beyond the superficial soundbites and slogans, such as ‘Inclusion, not exclusion.’ I’ve yet to meet the teacher who delights in excluding children from their classrooms, but it’s admittedly impossible to include and educate children unless they adhere to an acceptable code of conduct.

Look into any child’s eyes, and you can see 50+ years of labour ahead of them. I’ve always done everything in my power to help students learn, develop character and embark on careers befitting their talents, and the same goes for my colleagues. Please – help us to help students find their best selves.

At the same time, support those teachers who refuse to accept abusive behaviour from students or their families. Teachers already have solutions to hand for eradicating unacceptable behaviour, but the power to implement humane solutions is one that seems to be rarely granted.

Consequently, we’ve seen too many ‘unteachable’ teens leave our schools as broken and unemployable young adults, unwilling to accept the behavioural norms that accompany adult life. As one of my wisest mentors would regularly insist, ‘Get classroom behaviour right, and everything else will fall into place.’

Finally, we need to secure a sensible, long-term pay structure for teachers. What works for MPs’ salaries should similarly apply to all public sector workers. Today’s young teachers will have paid over £36k for their education, yet their pay in real terms is currently less than mine was in 1993.

If that doesn’t change, it’s difficult to see where the next generation of teachers will come from – particularly if such selfless dedication results in them having to use food banks to survive.

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor while running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); find out more at prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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It’s a brilliant definition that aptly describes any graduation ceremony. The communal razzmatazz of airborne caps, gowns, scrolls and speeches externally symbolise the inner achievements of those who toil in our educational vineyards.

American families rightly celebrate their children’s achievements when they complete a four-year high school programme from the age of 15 until 18. Most parents aren’t celebrating outstanding successes in public examinations, since the majority don’t take any. Instead, they’re acknowledging the character it takes to show up for school regularly and give one’s best.

An annual PSAT test will give children a national STEM ranking, but this doesn’t directly affect one’s graduation. (Not that children’s worth should be reduced to academic grades.) To actually graduate, students require a minimum ‘D’ grade (60%) in every class they’ve taken throughout the four years, along with acceptable attendance, community service hours and a good disciplinary record.

Most American schools offer three tiered programmes: Advanced Placement (externally assessed), Honours, and Regular. If students undertake rigorous AP courses, their grades, behaviour, and effort must be exemplary. Should they fall behind, they must quickly catch up via extra work or else drop a level.

American parents rarely oppose streaming, because they believe schools must identify and nurture their most academically able students if America is to remain a global superpower. Today’s future scientists, surgeons and senators are therefore encouraged from an early age.

Places at society’s top tables may be theoretically open to everyone, but in practice they’re earned by those who diligently pursue their own ‘American dream’ with an effective gameplan.

The US system isn’t flawless or entirely stress-free, but it does serve families well – and we in the UK could learn from some of its strengths.

Seeking honours

Americans broadly accept that only 25% of students will go on to study at the highest academic level. Creating a more equitable world requires us to address a few universal realities more honestly – including the fact that whatever system we operate, some children will always be ‘book-smarter’ than others.

Seen in this light, American high schools are where the rigour of British grammar schools is incorporated into a comprehensive model. Among children not yet at AP level, parents will often remain ambitious for them to get into honours classes. About 40% succeed, with these hard-working students then going on to apply to reputable universities.

That leaves around 35% of teens taking regular courses that provide a flexible, collaborative and relaxed pace of learning. The emphasis on regular classes allows students to acquire a solid foundation in the basics of core subjects.

Subject teachers, supervised by administrators, will determine and adjust the curriculum for these classes, with diligent students often upgraded into honours classes. Undergraduates can also be upgraded to higher-ranked universities after two years.

Thanks to this graduation system, the 18 years I spent teaching in Florida gifted me an autonomy denied to most UK educators. I was obligated to teach church history and global ethics, but what we covered was my choice. US teachers are encouraged to create and submit their own honours and regular courses to their principals.

All assessments, including final exams, are entrusted to teachers, rather than academic boards. The tremendous benefit here is that teachers are able to select material that engages their students – and if possible, will bin the boring bits. When teachers teach to their passions, students learn far more.

The GCSE straitjacket

Conversely, teachers in the UK will often observe students struggling to cope with the straitjacket of GCSEs, but lack any recourse to options that will alleviate such pressures and make courses more relatable. American educators have the freedom to honour the ‘spirit’, rather than the ‘letter’ of academic laws.

My greatest concern for UK students falling short of GCSE standards is that they’ll become disillusioned or disruptive and stop trying. Many teenagers leave school with nothing comparable to an officially recognised graduation certificate that symbolises and celebrates their abilities and best efforts.

As I’ve seen first-hand, internal assessments enable teachers to respect, cultivate, and reward the emotional literacy and resilience of their students, as well as the cognitive skills measured by traditional exams.

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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She has raised three remarkably independent daughters, and held down a full-time managerial position at a City law firm for 12 years while she studied.

Yet while she enjoys the job and its generous benefits, education is her true passion. Eve is an engaging and impressive communicator, and would have become a certified teacher were it not for one irrelevant gap in her otherwise impressive CV – she needs a grade C/4 GCSE in mathematics to commence a secondary PGCE.

Why?

Unfit to teach

Eve left school at 15, later blossoming as a mature student, with the result that a maths qualification was never something she’d required or needed. Indeed, I myself excelled in my undergraduate logic class without studying maths.

This ‘illogical’ GCSE requirement maligns the work of humanities scholars who dexterously manipulate and evaluate the complex empirical and theoretical data generated by their disciplines. Many teachers successfully utilise intuition, logic, and imagination without the conscious application of maths.

Yet the DfE insists that for now, Eve is unfit to teach English in state secondary schools – unless she acquires a ‘C/4’ in mathematics, whereupon she will be officially hailed as the excellent candidate she already is. Sorry, but it simply doesn’t add up.

Bureaucratic myopia

Many among today’s online voices are actively seeking to expose this lazy and prejudicial DfE ruling that hones in on people’s supposed ‘deficiencies’ rather than celebrating their unique skills and talents.

Are we effectively barring the 35% of teens who fail to achieve a grade 4 in maths from teaching? Virtually all forms of prejudice reduce individuals to a small part of who they are. Instead of viewing the whole person, critics fixate on a perceived flaw. In this case, Eve may be brilliant, but tut tut, she hasn’t passed maths.

My own research has led to me identifying seven pillars of effective teachers – knowledge, passion, clarity, love, labour, creativity, and SOH. Mathematical mastery isn’t one of them.

As a primary school governor, I’ve supported drives for higher standards across the board in English, maths, and science. I’m not entirely opposed to setting rigorous standards for secondary PGCE students, but in this case, I do take issue with the bureaucratic myopia, superficiality and intransigence of the move – not the immense value of mathematics as a subject. It seems odd that we reularly take on new staff with with dyslexia across the teaching profession, while continuing to discriminate against those who aren’t consummate mathematicians.

‘Might is right’

Mathematical (in)ability doesn’t determine one’s ability to teach the arts and humanities. There are many ‘inspirational teachers’ currently in post who couldn’t pass a GCSE maths exam if they took one tomorrow. Should we fire them?
It’s an absurd and superficial rule that could conceivably have prevented Jesus Christ himself from teaching RE and Shakespeare from teaching a lesson on Macbeth.

I’ve written to the DfE repeatedly about it, and had eight different officers feed me the templated party line: “GCSE maths is a statutory requirement for initial teacher training courses…[It] also ensures that candidates have a minimum standard of educational attainment.”

This ‘circular’ auto-response doesn’t actually address the question – it merely dissolves it. It seems that the DfE would rather project a ‘might is right’ approach than reconfigure its entry requirements in a way that could significantly increase our talent pool.

So long as our egos are kept in check, one can never lose an argument. If anyone demolishes you in a debate, politely thank them and simply steal any ideas they present that you happen to agree with. So here’s one I stole earlier, courtesy of Plato:

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”

It’s time for us to stop defending the indefensible and instead welcome any and all candidates with immense character, strong subject knowledge, acute thinking skills, and empathetic mindsets into our diverse schools.

John Lawson (@johninpompano) is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com

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I always knew that my next unscripted utterance had the potential to, at best, enlighten my audience or, at worst, get me fired.

When the principal first accepted my proposal for a new ethics course, she warned me that parents would frequently complain more forcefully about ethics classes than those for any other subject – even politics. “Your job,” she stressed, “is to ensure that more compliments than complaints about you are ringing in my ears.”

At first, I naïvely assumed that this would be more likely if I maintained a strict fidelity to honest facts. It soon turned out that being truthful did indeed serve me well in my relations with students – but that when dealing with parents and administrators, greater circumspection would often be required.

The grey zone

I used to welcome my new students by giving them a copy of a laminated sign I had displayed on my classroom wall, which read as follows:

WELCOME TO THE GREY ZONE
Warning – the atmosphere of this room is not
conducive to closed, prejudiced, or simple minds; open-and-shut cases; black-and-white issues; paper tiger hunting; straw man savaging; self-aggrandising grandstanding; no-brainers; sound bites; or mere opinions.

In this classroom, we separate ‘wise guys’ from ‘wise-guys’. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. We will seek the truth and facts whenever possible, guided by love and mutual respect for everyone.

The grey zone is where grey matter wrestles with the grey areas of contemporary moral issues. I can still recall my Catholic students becoming visibly puzzled when I told them that my first loyalty was not to them, their parents, the principal, the Pope, holy texts, or even Jesus Christ (pausing briefly for effect) – it was to truth and honesty.

When we choose to put ego aside and seek the truth, it becomes impossible to lose arguments. Codology, pontification and truth decay, on the other hand, are reliably and painfully debilitating.

Teachers should seek to promote ideas that benefit wider society, rather than those which only serve narrow interest groups. While we will never all be ‘the same’, we should at least recognise the importance of aspiring towards universal equality.

Despite this, however, if I’d dared to point out, for example, that turtles’ eggs are given greater protections than those afforded unborn humans, friends would have shunned me and my career would have taken a very different turn.

Virtue and values

Telling the truth can often provoke rage and accusations of so-called virtue signalling – ‘Tone it down, can’t you?!’ But when does one’s tone ‘become acceptable’? Should we keep modifying our views until they become bland and homogenised?

Looked at this way, it’s hard to see why anyone would attack any teacher who consistently advocates for life, love, and liberty over violence, hatred, and suppression. Truth and honesty aren’t controversial – so it follows that nobody should be disciplined for expressing demonstrable facts, right?

One racist parent at the school demanded my instant dismissal after I’d told a class that racism was ‘born of ignorance’, but I’d maintain that making moral judgments about others based on biological difference is ignorant. Then there was the time an archbishop chided me for declaring that since nobody chooses their sexual orientation, being gay cannot be intrinsically sinful or immoral.

Socrates suggested that virtue and values can’t be taught – but if we fail to properly value truth and honesty, then we’re merely making noises. What has always saddened me most is seeing the despair of impoverished teenagers who see education as a game of two sides – one in which their side is always playing uphill and into the wind.

And to some extent they’re right, given how geography so frequently determines destiny. Nor does it help that the very people best placed to tackle this are facing disadvantages of their own. How should I motivate aspiring teachers when supply work pays £100 a day? My plumber makes £400+ a day.

What price do we risk by telling teenagers the truth – the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – when our words and motives may well be taken down and used against us?

John Lawson (@johninpompano) is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com

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Success can be defined as being the best we can be at something we love. We can’t all be the best, but we can certainly all give our best.

Most students enjoy exploring their talents, and thanks to Aristotle, we know that the pursuit of eudaimonia, or happiness/wellbeing, is written into their hearts. Even Dickens’ arch misanthrope, Ebeneezer Scrooge, ultimately sought a form of happiness. It just took three ghostly teachers to re-direct him.

We must teach teenagers not to dismiss education as a soulless process of acquiring awards, grades, and certificates, but instead recognise that its real worth lies in what it can do to help us acquire an identity that goes on to shape our destiny.

We shouldn’t assume that students are aware of how important mindsets are, or know how to study effectively, because most of them don’t. If you need proof, ask your charges to evaluate their understanding of secondary education, and be prepared to encounter some amazing and occasionally bizarre answers.

I’d wager that their responses likely wouldn’t match mine – that secondary education involves teachers helping students to discover their natural talents, and encourage their development so that they may enjoy and value the gift of life that everyone has equal shares in.

What’s in your teaching credo?

The pursuit of happiness

Learning to think independently and study effectively plays a key role in adolescent formation. I can still recall my first life skills class when teaching at a school in Florida, with a group of high-flying seniors a semester away from graduation. I’d challenged them to compose and frame ‘10 Commandments of Success’ that they’d take with them to college.

What I received from these 30 Advanced Placement (A-level equivalent) students was astonishing. Why would teenagers who had secured places at Harvard and Princeton tacitly accept that stress and success were inseparable? Why were so few of them excited to pursue careers offering something beyond outward respectability, comfortable salaries and robust pension plans?

I can’t pretend that the pursuit of happiness and academic success will ever be easy, or entirely stress-free. It is, however, much easier to take on life’s mountains when we’re properly equipped and willing to listen to the lead Sherpa.

These, then, are my own five indisputable steps to success in any field, which I’d invite you to share with your students…

1. Want it
When you want to succeed as much as a drowning person wants to breathe, you’ll be successful. We all need to discover who we are and find that one thing we value above everything else.

2. Show up every day – body and soul
If you want to be a winner, you have to sign up for the race and be ready to give everything. We can only take out of life what we’ve deposited into our accounts.

3. Don’t shirk from hard work
It’s absurd to think that laziness can be priced into any success story. Michael Phelps is the most successful Olympian of all time, and nobody knows better than him how significant the eight hours a day he spent swimming laps was to his phenomenal success.

4. Never Give up
When Thomas Edison was experimenting with various lightbulb designs, his frustrated research assistant urged him to quit after ‘2,000 failures’. But Edison persevered, because he realised that discovering 2,000 ways of not making a lightbulb is still a type of progress, rather than failure. So go light your world!

5. Be ready when Lady Luck calls…
…because she rarely does call-backs. The harder we work, and the more risks we take, the more likely it is that we’ll eventually attract Lady Luck.

May this be a stellar new school year for you all, blessed with energised students and great teachers who are ready to show them that success isn’t a zero-sum game, nor the preserve of other people.

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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I wasn’t teaching in schools throughout the pandemic, and thus came across a few discussions of problems I hadn’t faced personally – yet some teaching practices don’t change, and it seemed to me that the disruptions of COVID made it more important than ever to identify what those might be.

Sadly, though, while sharing my thoughts regarding some treasured teaching truisms, I found myself periodically admonished by a high profile Twitter user who I shall henceforth refer to as ‘Dr. No’ – someone who I can only assume teaches classes exclusively populated with delightful children.

According to Dr. No, if children are regularly late for class, teachers should celebrate their arrival rather than admonish them. Grades, they insist, are merely the degrading tools of elitists. If students cheat on tests, it’s because schools falsely equate grades with ability. Ergo, all tests and grade books should be abolished.

Irreparable harm

Homework is another no-no, since it steals too much precious leisure time. Children mustn’t be corrected, because that might irreparably harm their self-esteem. Juvenile curses aimed at teachers? Those are simply primal cries for unconditional love. You see, the kids in our classrooms genuinely want to learn, though will occasionally – and entirely understandably – rage against its debasement by totalitarian propagandists.

Oh, and uniforms engender conformism, And asking permission to use the bathroom is humiliating and controlling.

Really?

Let’s imagine what the wholesale abolition of homework, tests, grades, codes of conduct, and bathroom passes might look like. Will our students continue to give their absolute best every day? Can we expect all children to never be naughty or indolent ever again? How can children develop character if we never challenge them?

Okay, boomer

When I put such questions to Dr. No, they wouldn’t respond personally – though their ultra-progressive acolytes could always be relied upon to rabidly attack me for questioning Dr. No’s omniscience. ‘Dr No has a YouTube channel! Have you?’

I don’t.

Before encountering ‘the Doc’ and their 80k followers, I rarely had cause to question my own deeply held liberal-ish credentials. Yet now I’m frequently left agog at how the well-documented history of education in this country goes blithely ignored.

I remember all too well the schoolteachers who would routinely beat, shame and humiliate us baby boomers. I can still recall how Mr. Wellard once twisted my ear, while guffawing to the rest of the class about how he’d written my recommendation letter for “UAS – ‘The University of Advanced Stupidity!” But, please – do tell me more about how humiliating 21st century teaching practices are.

Apologists for excellence

The college professors who influenced me the most had a genuine love for teaching and cared about my wellbeing.

Unlike Dr. No and co, however, they didn’t routinely demonise the system or their colleagues, nor did they idealise their students. Instead, they accepted us for who we were, while challenging us to improve ourselves. I was never reduced to my IQ, postcode, or past misadventures. My teachers were apologists for excellence who unapologetically demanded my best.

As such, red ink would be liberally scrawled across my grammatical and intellectual shortcomings. I was once given an ‘F’ for misreading a question. Guess who made sure that wouldn’t happen again in his uni finals…?

Teachers need assessments which can establish whether what we think we are teaching is what our students are indeed learning. Are their academic achievements comparable to local, national, or global standards? Good educators don’t pretend that success and happiness are easily found, because they’re not. They mix hope with realism.

Students need to think for themselves, identify and nurture their unique gifts and talents, appreciate that respect is a two-way street and graft at their chosen craft. Ultimately, I want my students to accept that the teachers who prepare them for life’s inevitable challenges – rather than those who would prefer to wish such challenges away – really aren’t the enemy.

John Lawson (@johninpompano) is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com

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Throughout my NQT year, I was required to hand in 23 detailed plans in advance every Monday. Each plan required an aim, at least three objectives, a starter, development strategies 1 and 2, a concluding strategy, homework explanation and evidence of differentiation – plus SEND provisions and allowances.

Copies of all differentiated resources and tests were stapled to my lesson plans. I was allotted two 35-minute planning periods a week, one of which was spent with my Head of Department who would often excoriate most of my efforts: ‘Ridiculous … redo these.‘ I almost suffered a breakdown trying to conform to her rigid ideas of perfection.

This was 1993, with no internet or email. I was earning £13,000 a year, there were holes in the soles of my shoes and I was skipping meals to pay the bills.

A callous burden

For ECTs in 2022, not enough has changed. The process of submitting accurate lesson plans a week in advance continues to be an exhausting one and rarely achievable, given that Week 8 plans depend on everything going according to plan in Week 7. How often does that happen?

By mid-October, my own lesson plans would have typically become works of fiction – mere meat thrown to ravenous box-tickers. I’d arrive at school at 7am each morning, sip some coffee while breaking bread with the janitor in his bunker, and then secretly scribble some helpful lesson notes. Those 15 hours spent each week on planning blighted my weekends.

So imagine my astonishment when I read recently of a bill passed by the Indiana House of Representatives, requiring its teachers in the state to post lesson plans online for the entire year. In the midst of a pandemic, how could anyone impose such a callous burden and hope to keep their underpaid, exhausted teachers on board?

One can just picture the lawyers of the most litigious nation on Earth lining up to help themselves to this Hades-sent gravy bowl: ‘Mr. Lawson – you have presented yourself to this court, under oath, as a certified master teacher…yet exhibit 127b establishes that you egregiously misled the children entrusted to your care…‘

The thing is, though, busy administrators rarely read lesson plans – an observation once shared with me by a seasoned cynic who regularly cut and pasted impressive-looking plans that he never taught (and for which he never got caught).

Mid-lesson epiphanies

Meticulously crafted lesson plans are no guarantee of engaging lessons. Teachers will often devise terrific ideas in their hearts and heads that are difficult to convey on paper. Some of my best teaching moments have often come from mid-lesson epiphanies. We need to address the countless hours that exhausted teachers spend on pro-forma lesson plans, while still recognising importance of skilful planning and acknowledging the need for an agreed curriculum.

My own attempt at doing that took the form of a simple statement that for 15 years I would regularly submit to my Head of Department at the Florida High School where I was based: ‘I promise that I will teach our published programme, bell-to-bell every day with as much passion and skill as I possess.‘ I signed off on this annually, which obligated me to honour my pledge – and I did.

My advice to those elected representatives in Indiana is to ask themselves which other authorities in the world have ever made such demands of their educators. Because the extraordinary pressures that would consequently be placed on teachers at the end of the school year are impossible to deny.

Excellent teaching happens at the hands those who remain open to the limitless possibilities that emerge as a lesson unfolds. If we want teachers to continue sharpening their knowledge and skills, why subject them to pointless box-ticking labour?

If teachers are already doing their best every day, as the vast majority are, then formal lesson plans aren’t necessary. And if that’s the case, why should anyone expect rigid, long-range lesson planning to ever tick the right boxes in the first place?

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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Mr. Zahawi urged schools to root out ‘activist teachers’ and ensure that their teachers offer “Balanced presentations of opposing political views to their students.” Now, primary schoolchildren might not be as partisan as politicians, but they’re often remarkably astute people watchers.

My own great-niece adores Ant & Dec, and thinks Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin are “Fibbers who belong on the naughty step!” And having missed out on being able to have parties for her 7th and 8th birthdays, she wants whoever attended the Downing Street parties to be grounded indefinitely. Seems fair.

Apoliticism versus impartiality

Mr. Zahawi went on to remind England’s educators of the 1996 DfE directive to refrain from ‘explicit partisan politics’. On the whole, teachers generally accept this ruling, so long as it doesn’t amount to advocacy of propaganda or apoliticism.

Apoliticism serves to falsely imply that politics only concerns politicians. Since politics will now and forever touch students’ lives, it’s important that they’re able to identify and understand political processes. Impartiality requires fidelity to open, critical, and truthful discourse in all subjects – which for teachers, should be as natural as breathing.

Thus, it’s possible for teachers to state that the discovery and use of vaccines to treat disease should be applauded as an exceptional scientific achievement, while maintaining that the exams fiascos we’ve seen in the last two years were abysmal and entirely avoidable. Teachers may not always know the truth, but we certainly can and will expose nonsense when we see it.

If teachers are only ever permitted to highlight political positives, then the process of teaching itself becomes a mere propaganda exercise. If, back in February, teachers had briefly discussed ‘Partygate’ with students asking for their views – as teenagers do – the safest thing would have been to say ‘Let’s wait for Sue Grey’s findings’, despite that being a partisan position at the time.

(Though if teachers want to maintain the respect of their smartest students, they won’t wait for them to point out that a civil servant who didn’t attend the gatherings can’t tell us what happened at them…)

A communal activity

Mr. Zahawi was correct when he asserted that, “The next generation is more than capable of making their own decisions.” That’s because trustworthy teachers teach them to think critically, carefully and as objectively as possible.

Students are taught to carefully assess the facts and opinions of others before forming opinions of their own. Even if rogue teachers attempt to promote certain sociological, religious, or political doctrines – it occasionally happens – the balanced curriculum, rights of free speech and diversity of opinions within the school community will make any subsequent indoctrination all but impossible.

I was a teacher in the US when George Floyd’s arrest was first shown on TV. I told my students then that I’d witnessed the most cowardly act of policing in my life, and that I’d cried for a man I’d never meet. I later heard from a friend that a teacher at their school told his students that Floyd might still be alive if he hadn’t ‘Stupidly resisted arrest’. Moments later, more than half of his students spontaneously walked out or switched him off.

Learning is a communal activity that’s primed to root out prejudice, ignorance, rhetoric and dishonesty, and draws on the kind of classroom dynamics that have been sorely missed throughout the pandemic. Teachers can’t dictate the direction of teenagers’ views, because we demand that they think for themselves from primary school onwards.

Despite all the recent talk of ‘levelling up’, many poorer students feel the government is making it harder to access further education. The less affluent their family is, the more likely it is that a student will fear the prospect of getting into debt. That’s not a party political view promoted by radical activists – if low-income families feel that their council or government isn’t listening to them, teachers will advocate on their behalf.

By the same token, we’ll happily sing the praises of any authority that treasures free speech and equal opportunities as much as we do. If that makes us partisan activists, so be it.

John Lawson is a former secondary teacher, now serving as a foundation governor and running a tutoring service, and author of the book The Successful (Less Stressful) Student (Outskirts Press, £11.95); for more information, visit prep4successnow.wordpress.com or follow @johninpompano

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