Stop taking the Michael, Michael!

Abstract

Email: ptu@markallengroup.com Stop taking the Michael, Michael! And for our next act... it’s the two Michaels...! At a recent conference of independent school headteachers in Brighton, Ofsted head Sir Michael Wilshaw stunned the teaching profession by suggesting that teachers do not know what stress is and that they should ‘roll up their sleeves and get on with improving their schools’. ‘Stress is what my father felt, who struggled to find a job in the 50s and 60s and who often had to work long hours in three different jobs to support a growing family,’ Sir Michael declared. ‘Stress is what I was under when I started as a head in 1985, doing lunch duty on my own every day for three years because of colleagues who worked to rule,’ he ploughed on, warming to his theme. Had Sir Michael forgotten to whom he was addressing? You’d think someone could have slipped him a note from the wings. The idea that one person can saunter in and tell another person that the stress they claim to feel is, in fact, all in their head, is either remarkably arrogant or remarkably obtuse, neither of which are particularly desirable qualities in one’s education chief inspector. It’s a bit like someone with depression phoning up a helpline and being told that they’re not depressed because they haven’t experienced famine or war. The most galling thing is that he included himself in the anecdote: so teaching was stressful when you were doing it, Sir Michael, but now you’ve left the profession it’s a breeze! Right, glad you cleared that up for us... Not to be outdone, Michael Gove also stepped up to the plate this month with some choice remarks on performance related pay: ‘We are concerned that the pay system continues to reward low-performers at the same levels as their more successful peers,’ he said. Putting the jibe to one side, salary is important – no-one is saying its isn’t (least of all public sector workers who have had to put up with pension cuts and pay freezes) – but it would be difficult to devise a fair performance related pay system when there is such a range and complexity of factors influencing how well pupils do at school. The psycholoigist Frederick Herzberg believed that recognition is one of the key motivational factors in our working lives. If those leading and influencing education policy invested the same amount of energy into raising the morale of teachers as they put into criticising the many for the shortcomings of the few, who knows what could be achieved. PTU