Post Mock Blues

By now the year 11 (and possibly year 13) mocks are over, or very nearly over and so our focus turns to more important things – namely, how the hell are we going to improve these results?

This is a fundamental problem with teaching and I have no clue how to solve it. We need students to improve their results because it makes the school look good in league tables¹, but more importantly, it’s important for them and their future.

Not all students (or parents) care about their results. Some already have their future plans already mapped out – especially if they are from a farming background – and so they don’t see the need for qualifications. This is obviously not true of all farmers, or farming families, but it is true for a very vocal minority in my experience. I get it too – why bother with all that work if it’s not going to be of any practical use?

I had a student last year who was really bright, and could easily have got grade 7 in maths, but all he wanted to do was be on his farm. He did no work, no homework, disrupted lessons to get kicked out and so on. He was a nice lad, and I’m sure he’s very happy now, but as long as we keep education as one size fits all then we will be failing some students. Perhaps many students.

But we also have to temper this with aspiration – why settle for anything less than your best? Unfortunately, teenagers don’t usually think like that. The students who do have drive and ambition stick out because they are unusual. If you ask a student what they want to do when they’re older, the majority don’t have a clue².

Anyway, back to the mocks. By now, you’ll have marked some papers, probably with a sinking sense of dread. How the hell are you going to explain these results to your line manager or even SLT? What are you going to do about it?

I’ll repeat that: What are YOU going to do about it?

You, the teacher. The one who has already spent hours planning, delivering and assessing lessons. The one who has already contacted home. Had parents in. Delivered many catch-up sessions or detentions.

Surely a better question is: What are THEY going to do about it?

THEY is the students themselves. In my current role, I am coaching teachers, which is brilliant and I love it. Making small changes to lessons to make them better is great fun and I feel very fortunate to be doing this job. However, what is the case in the vast majority of the lessons I observe is that staff are working harder than students.

Results will not improve massively as long as that remains the case. Students have to take responsibility for their learning, and that is difficult because most of them are just thinking about what they are having for tea, whether the party this weekend is going to happen or not because Don³ was sick at the last one and his parents weren’t happy, whether the person you fancy even knows you exist, will there be a sequel to K-Pop Demon Hunters, when will Taylor Swift’s new album drop, why is everyone obsessed with Taylor Swift, are we all going to die in an ecological collapse⁴, and so on.

All of which means we have to make them care, and make them do more work. Enter SLT and the demand⁵ that you do extra sessions, which you’d planned on delivering anyway but are now pissed off because it feels like an imposition.

I firmly believe the best intervention happens in lessons or in small groups, and I’ll save that for a future post. For now, here’s a brief example of why students are hopeless⁶ about their own futures.

Years ago, in his careers interview in year 11, a lad was asked what he wanted to do when he left school. The conversation, with the careers lead, went something like this:

“Professional footballer.”

“That’s fantastic! What team do you play for?”

“None.”

“Oh, have you played for the county then?”

“No.”

“The school?”

“No.”

“Okay, so, do you play with your mates then?”

“No.”

“What do you do then?”

“I’m really good at FIFA.”

Until next time.

1. Comparing schools this way is kind of ludicrous, unless they have the same intake and same funding. ↩︎
2. When I was 16, I wanted to be a computer programmer. When I went to uni, I signed up to do Computer Science and promptly fell asleep in the first lecture. I switched to maths one day later. ↩︎
3. Other names available here. All of them probably. ↩︎
4. Snuck a serious one in there to check you’re still paying attention. ↩︎
5. Usually with a spurious calculation that shows you are under your 1265 hours. ↩︎
6. Deluded. ↩︎