Paul Kessell-Holland @PKHFoundation
Programme Manager, Professional Standards & Workforce Development, The Education and Training Foundation
What is it that you do? I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question, go on, tell yourself what it is you do for a living.
Is it a job? Do you grumble your way out of the house each morning praying for a train strike and positively glow when we are forecast more than three inches of snow (the requisite dose in most of the UK to close our beleaguered transport network).
Or is it a vocation, a career? Do you, when asked to discuss your work have a boundless love of what you do and how you do it? Given the chance and a willing audience could you fill their day with descriptions and anecdotes of why you love what you do, and find it hard to imagine anyone as happy and satisfied with their lot as you? Does smugness fill your waking moments and do you train carrier pigeons to get messages to the office in case of the aforementioned snow also cutting off the power supplies?
Chances are, like most people, you exist on a scale between the two. If you are a teacher, (particularly in the education and training sector) you exist on two such scales. Go on, if you don’t teach try and work that one out, (if you do then by all means, feel smug for a minute or two – I am expecting most of you reading this are currently glowing in smugness).
Now think about what you mean by standards. Is it the dress code? Your choice of language? Do you worry about how to behave in your mother in law’s company (or is that just me?). Just like trying to describe your job, standards mean many things to many people, and being assessed on your standards is something that would fill many of us with real dread, and with good reason. In education this is particularly acute – without trying particularly hard I can reel off a list of competing standards that our sector employs, from NOS to ISO and everything in between.
We all have days that it would help if the sun was shining, if we hadn’t tripped over the dog, if the kids were not annoying us, if…… And on those days being told you are being inspected at how good you are in your job would concern even the most calm and collected of us. Once again, back to being a teacher where in our sector that means being inspected at not only your ability to know what you are talking about in your chosen specialist subject, but also your organisation skills, admin, photocopying (!) and crowd control (please keep adding to this list if you teach, otherwise try and imagine any part of that whilst people with clipboards and the ability to alter your career are watching). When looking at the need for standards in education, it is really easy to want to give teachers a break. When we look at things through this lens our educators do a difficult job, maintain a second profession to be able to teach it, and deliver challenging targets in often challenging circumstances. It really can be like going out to play cricket with a broken bat, if you like sporting metaphors.
So why do standards matter so much? Because they aren’t there just for the days that OFSTED decide to turn their withering gaze on your classroom / workshop / patch of grass. They are there all the time, and intended to be a guide to help you be ready for that day. And the day you have to suddenly help a class of learners prepare to write a report and you discover half of them struggle with spelling and have low basic maths. And there for you to remember that researching once in a while what other teachers are doing will make you a better teacher. And, above all they are there to make you aspire to be better than you currently are.
So, if you answered my first question ‘I’m a teacher’. Was it a job? I hope it was a vocation, because anyone who teaches can tell you it makes you who you are. I also hope you have a look at the teaching standards for your sector, because they can help make you who you are, who you want to be, and who your learners need you to be. That is why standards matter. They were written by your sector, for your sector, and are being used right now, in your sector.