Sunday, February 08, 2009

Arrogant British schoolteachers

Last week, before the snow, I received a distinctly snotty letter from one of my youngest son's school mistresses, rebuking me for my failure to attend a parents' evening at his comprehensive. 'I was disappointed that you were unable to attend,' she wrote. She went on: 'Attendance at the annual Parents' Meeting is part of the Home-School agreement that you signed on your child's admission.' But it was the last sentence that really irritated me: 'If you have not already notified the school in writing of the reason why you were unable to attend, please return the reply slip below so that it can be recorded in the student file.'

Blimey! I hadn't been ticked off like that since I was a schoolboy myself, summoned to the headmaster's study to account for the appearance of a frog in the matron's room. I can understand how teachers get into the habit of addressing everyone like children. But at the age of 55, I rather resent being treated like a delinquent teenager for my failure to attend a meeting arranged for the school's convenience, not mine. I remembered, too, that her original summons had been just as bossy, telling me it was 'essential' that all parents should attend and that we should make sure to arrive before 5.30pm so that we would have time to meet all our son's teachers before the meeting ended at 8.30pm.

Well, I don't finish work until 9.30pm at the earliest. I wondered how this teacher would feel if I summoned her to my office on the other side of London at a time she couldn't manage - and then demanded a written explanation and apology. Besides, I've always found these evenings a complete waste of time for teachers and parents alike. Yes, I know that my boys are intelligent, and I know that they could work harder. Why should my wife and I have to queue for three hours to be told that, by one teacher after another?

Fizzing with indignation, therefore, I seized the reply slip - headed in bold type 'Non Attendance at Year 11 Parents Meeting' and beginning 'I/we were not able to attend the Year 11 Parents Meeting because. . .'. I wrote: 'In these desperate times for job security in the private sector, I simply cannot afford to take time off in the middle of my working day to accommodate your desire to get home early and your unwillingness to hold parents' evenings at the weekend. I am disappointed that you seem unable to appreciate what is happening in the world beyond the school gates.' I reckoned that if she could be snotty, then so could I.

My poor son was horrified. 'You just can't send that,' he said. 'You can't!' He told me it made me sound disgustingly pompous and arrogant. Oh, all right, what he actually said was that it made me sound like a 'd***head'. He wouldn't be able to show his face in school ever again if his teacher read it. In fact, he would have to kill me.

Still indignant, I stuck to my guns and gave the reply slip to my wife to post in the morning, since our boy was obviously not going to hand it in himself. She put it in her handbag. The following day, it had disappeared. Somebody had got up in the middle of the night and disposed of it. If truth be told, I was quite glad. In the cold light of dawn, I could see that what I'd written was indeed a little hoity-toity and unfair, and that the moral ground on which I stood was not quite as high as it had seemed the night before.

After all, journalists' working hours are unusual, and probably most parents would have been able to make it to the school by 5.30pm without too much disruption. I supposed, too, that with its very mixed catchment area, my son's school must have problems with feckless parents who don't really care about their children's education. Perhaps his teacher's hectoring language was understandable - and, yes, perhaps I could have made more effort to find someone to cover for me so that I could attend the wretched meeting. Then there was the fact that my son had said he particularly liked this teacher. I suspect that, with her strong disciplinarian streak, she is also very good at her job. The last thing I wanted was to stir up ill-feeling.

But that was last week, before Sunday night's snowfall. On Monday morning, when my son arrived at school, he found it closed for the day - and it was shut on Tuesday, too. (His elder brother's school, further out of town, was also shut on Wednesday.) For heaven's sake, why? Almost all the pupils at my youngest's school live within walking distance of its gates - and I suspect most of the teachers do, too. Is there really a law which makes schools financially answerable for falls in the playground, when everywhere for miles around is covered in ice? If so, it's a damned silly one, which should be repealed immediately.

As I trudged to work through the snow on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, while my sons' teachers snuggled up under their duvets, I found myself wishing that I had indeed posted my hoity-toity reply slip. The moral high ground was mine once again!

I haven't managed to lay my hands on that 'Home-School agreement'. But if it really obliges me to attend parents' evenings, shouldn't it also have a clause suggesting that teachers should turn up to work in term-time - even when it's a little parky? The closures weren't so bad for me because my young are just old enough to be left at home alone. But what about those hundreds of thousands of working parents of younger children, who had to take time off work themselves if they couldn't make alternative childcare arrangements?

There's a public sector mentality at work here - both in the casual assumption that we can all abandon our factories and offices to attend parents' meetings and in the failure of so many schools to make any effort to stay open in the snow.

Of course, there are many thousands of dedicated teachers in this land, who constantly put themselves out for their pupils and who often don't get the recognition they richly deserve. But I can't help remembering, too, that every day of the school year, an average of 15,000 teachers in Britain are off sick - whatever the weather. It's the same in the police force, where absenteeism is endemic, and in almost every other area of the public sector. I notice, for example, that my newsagent managed to deliver my papers yesterday, whereas the postman hasn't called all week. They have the same hill and the same ice to contend with. The difference is that one works in the private sector, while the other works in the public, where there's much less need to bother.

Indeed, I find this increasing divide between the two sectors of our economy even more worrying in its implications for social cohesion than the row over foreign workers. Only this week, we learned that a quarter of our council taxes now go to financing gold-plated, final-salary town hall pensions which are now all but unavailable in the private sector. Meanwhile, state-sector workers are paid on average 62 pounds a week more than their private-sector counterparts.

As the recession bites harder, I see trouble ahead - particularly since the public sector goes on expanding, while jobs in private industry are disappearing at a terrifying rate. Schools Secretary Ed Balls's latest wheeze, I notice, is to set up 20,000 public sector apprenticeships - including jobs for school-leavers as assistant teachers. I can tell you that if I get any snotty letters from a 16-year-old, with three GCSEs, admonishing me for failing to attend a parents' evening, I won't be answerable for my actions.

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