- The girl was ignoring me and playing music on her mobile
phone, so loudly that the rest of the class could hear. I kept telling
her to stop. Then suddenly she lost control. Standing up, she put her face
inches from mine and shrieked: "Don't make me hurt you. I swear to
God I will do it."
-
- I was two days into my undercover investigation for a
Channel 4 Dispatches programme when this incident happened. It was the
first time I had felt physically threatened in school and the feeling
stayed
with me for a long time. Although extreme, this was the type of behaviour
I encountered again and again in the 16 secondary schools I went in to,
eventually filming those that seemed to be representative of the problems
I saw.
-
- What struck me very early on was that poor, even
outrageous
indiscipline - children leaping across tables or wandering around
brandishing
fire extinguishers - had become acceptable. At one school, I was calmly
advised by a female colleague to lock the classroom door while I was
teaching,
to "protect" myself and my class from the marauding groups in
the corridors. The look of surprise on my face did not seem to register
with her.
-
- Time and again I would be surprised, and shocked, and
eventually deeply saddened by what I saw in the state school system. A
combination of classroom disorder, endless supply teachers, conscientious
but jaded staff and school managers who seemed prepared to pretend that
all was well had created a situation that was a million miles away from
the Government rhetoric of rising standards.
-
- Every day children told me that they could not learn,
that there "was nowt to learn for". Yet in every chaotic
classroom,
there were one or two pupils huddled over books trying to do their work.
It was these children who convinced me that the story had to be
told.
-
- I began my undercover investigation in October, working
as a supply teacher in London and Leeds. Two weeks were spent at Intake
High School Arts College, in the Yorkshire city, a school that had failed
its last Office for Standards in Education report.
-
- In my very first lesson, I spent 20 minutes trying to
get children to be quiet, take their coats off, put away their mobile
phones
and stop hitting each other. Pupils were supposed to be studying for a
GCSE exam on earth materials but when I mentioned the subject, one girl
shouted out: "I haven't got a clue what earth materials are."
It transpired that a staggering 26 supply teachers had taken the class
since the start of the year.
-
- I tried to teach them but had been left with no real
instructions. In the worst example of this lack of planning, I was handed
a scrap of paper with "draw a picture of your favourite food"
written on it - that was for a class of 14-year-olds for an entire
hour.
-
- When Ofsted inspectors arrived the week after for a
two-day
visit, however, the school was suddenly transformed. I got through a whole
lesson without incident, the corridors were mayhem-free, the atmosphere
calmer. The mystery was solved by a classroom assistant who told me in
a hushed exchange in the lavatory that more than 20 of the most difficult
pupils had been sent on a "day trip".
-
- As inspectors monitored lessons, senior managers popped
up taking classes that they did not normally teach. Experienced teachers
from neighbouring schools were parachuted in. One teacher, who appeared
seemingly out of nowhere, said: "I've been drafted in basically to
give support to this department while HMI are in. It's a bit of a con-job
really." Staff at three other schools told me that "hiding"
problem pupils from inspectors was common practice.
-
- After each teaching stint, I came away asking whether
what I encountered could really be typical of inner-city school life? In
an attempt to get as accurate a picture as possible, I also registered
with a London supply agency and was sent to Highbury Grove School, in north
London. On my first day, I was told to "f*** off" by a
13-year-old
boy. In my shocked naivety, I said: "You can't say that to me."
He responded with a self-satisfied: "I just did."
-
- Worried about the levels of disruption I was
encountering,
I asked a colleague if children were playing up because I was a supply
teacher, only to be told that "it's normal, I promise you". And
it was.
-
- I filmed one instance in which three teenage girls talked
among themselves, sucking lollipops and putting on their lipstick while
a male teacher stood by repeatedly asking them to pay attention. Apart
from the odd glance of utter contempt, he was ignored. When he pressed
the "alert button" in an attempt to get another member of staff
to remove the girls from class, nobody came. He was left standing, at the
end of his tether, while the girls taunted him with: "There is nothing
you can do."
-
- "I had three fights in one lesson last week,"
another frustrated teacher told me in the staff room. "When the fourth
one started, I just couldn't be bothered. No one does anything
here."
-
- Meanwhile, a senior teacher who admitted the school was
still drawing up its behaviour policy, seemed bemused by what was going
on: "You can walk into any classroom at random and there isn't much
learning going on because of various forms of disruption," he said.
"When they tell their parents of their experiences, I'm surprised
that the parents don't take action. I mean, I certainly would."
-
- A very rosy picture is being painted by the Government
of standards getting better and GCSE results improving every year, while
the reality of what I saw in those 16 schools was very different. Behind
the statistics there are schools deliberately misleading inspectors, league
tables being manipulated, widespread out-of-control behaviour, violence,
swearing. Schools are under immense pressure not to exclude badly behaved
children, yet they do not seem to have the resources to deal with them
properly or the funding to have smaller classes or more classroom
assistants.
-
- When more than a third of children on the roll have
behaviour
problems, even the most dedicated teachers - and I met many during my
investigation
- are fighting a losing battle. The end result is that these schools are
not "normal comprehensives" and there is no way that the children
in them get anything like the kind of education that one would expect to
get in a "normal" school.
-
- Even in schools that seemed to offer some hope, where
results were rising, things were not all that they seemed. St Aloysius
Roman Catholic College for boys in Islington, north London, should have
been a showcase for New Labour, with a rise last year of 19 per cent in
the number of pupils gaining five A* to C grades.
-
- It is true that I had one of my best lessons at the
school,
behaviour was invariably good and children were learning. At this school,
the behaviour balance seems to have gone to the other extreme, under the
Government's banner of "zero-tolerance". Staff called pupils
"total scum" after an incident of vandalism, and shouted at them
to "bugger off, go home, we don't want you". In another incident,
recalled by a colleague, 25 children were made to sit in the hall for three
days. Just sit there, with no work.
-
- The school's rapid improvement in results was also far
from straightforward. Average or above-average ability students were
entered
for vocational qualifications, worth four GCSEs, which are generally aimed
at the less able. Here, as elsewhere, the pressure of league tables meant
teachers "lived or died" by their results.
-
- We have gone to great lengths to protect the identity
of the people in the programme but undoubtedly there will be criticism
of our secret filming. People may say that the programme is not fair to
the schools involved, but I believe that it is not fair for the pupils
in those schools to be condemned to a rough deal every day. That is my
defence.
-
- In moments of doubt, I will remember the 15-year-old
girl from Intake High, bright and cheerful despite the chaos, who started
to write a letter to Tony Blair in class. It began: "Dear Prime
Minister,
me and my colleagues have a problem. We have had 26 supply teachers since
the start of the year, when we should have a proper teacher because our
GCSEs are at risk."
-
- I hope she sent it. I really hope she did.
-
- - As told to Julie Henry
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
-
- http://telegraph.co.uk
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