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We might agree that teachers should keep their political views out of the classroom, but that’s not helped by politics persistently intruding on education, says IanMitchell … “Teachers shouldn’t execute government policy” A s a teacher, I’m not supposed to push my political views onto students, and yet political values have now become so embedded within education that I’m finding it harder and harder to be apolitical. I can certainly avoid telling students which party I voted for – that bit’s easy. Beyond that, I’ve done my best to conform with all the latest policies and adapt to changing expectations and etiquette within the staffroom. I’ve enthusiastically kept my Prevent training updated, used my recyclable mug at least four times and dutifully tutted when someone brought up the subject of Ricky Gervais’ recent opening speech at The Golden Globes. There have been times when I’ve gritted my teeth and other occasions when I’ve kept silent, but the way things are going, it won’t be long before I’m asked to go along with something that I can’t, in all conscience, support. Bought and paid for It wasn’t always this way. I can’t help but reflect on how politicised education has become in such a relatively short space of time. When I joined the profession as an English teacher back in 1998, New Labour had recently won the first of three general elections. After Tony Blair famously declared that the government’s three highest priorities were ‘education, education, education,’ one of its first moves was to introduce performance- related pay – a remuneration package designed to reward only good teachers. “We can’t have anything to do with that!” responded one of my senior colleagues at the time. “Either we all get a raise or none of us do.” That same teacher was swiftly gobsmacked to be told by his union to go along with PRP. As the union rep explained, this rhetoric around distinguishing ‘good teachers’ from ‘bad teachers’ was only intended to appease the public. What the government was actually doing, we were told, was setting up a hoop-jumping exercise designed to make it look as though only some teachers would be getting pay rises. Sooner or later, we’d start to see PRP benefiting everyone. So off scurried all those eligible teachers to busy themselves itemising all the tasks they performed on a daily basis – from the entering of marks into registers, to their lunchtime duties, the latter of which they were suddenly taking a much more active interest in. Some teachers even set about starting up new initiatives of their own, for no reason other than to cite these on their PRP submission forms. apolitical, while at the same time expecting teachers to execute government policy – Prevent being just one obvious example. When we have teachers actively looking out for signs and indicators of extremism that the government can’t find for themselves, our secondary schools have effectively become a political arm of Whitehall. Similarly, when primary teachers are called upon to inspect pupils’ lunch boxes as part of a calorie- counting exercise, teachers are, in effect, disciplining parents for their nutritional choices on behalf of the government. This political dimension to schools’ decision-making manifests in other ways, too. If parents take their children off on holiday during term time, the school fines them. But if they request a day off so that their family can attend a protest against climate change, it’ll be granted. Schools can do little when politicians have decreed that time off for a holiday is unacceptable, but a day off for “The problem,” my senior colleague reflected sadly, “is that by engaging with this we can’t then disengage . We’ll have to do whatever New Labour say. You can’t support a pay rise and then subsequently complain about what they’ve said you need to do in order to get it.” During that year, the education system was effectively bought and paid for. PRP meant that, by implication, the government knew what ‘good teaching’ was and what a ‘good teacher’ looked like. So it was that this concept of ‘good teaching’ began being drip-fed to NQTs. Lesson objectives should be written in the corner of the board, so that when reached they can be ticked off. The four-part lesson – starter, introduction, main and plenary – became the blueprint for ‘good teaching’. Certain assumptions started to take hold – if you ask a question and fewer than half the hands go up, then it wasn’t a very good question, was it? Tools ofWhitehall Over time, the scope of what’s understood as ‘good teaching’ has expanded beyond pedagogy. Successive governments have demanded that teachers be 12 teachwire.net/secondary “Our secondary schools have effectively become a political armof Whitehall”