OK, so let me begin by saying that I love Gareth Malone. I think he's great. All that work convincing teenage boys that singing, rather than being "gay" is in fact the best of things. Love it! I certainly don't resent him for his recent excursion into the world of teaching literacy to ten and eleven year old boys in London. I have no doubt that his 'trust me, I know I sound posh, but really I'm just one of you' countenance will work just as well on reluctant writers as it does on their singing equivalents. No, I really like Gareth and don't blame him for what I'm about to write.
But why, oh why do we need Gareth Malone to point out the bloody obvious? Any teacher worth their salt knows that, on the whole, boys don't want to sit down and write, that teaching using a 'one size fits all' approach for everyone isn't ideal and that you don't stand a snowball's hope in hades of writing in clear English if you can't speak in it. These are not new insights. These are the oldest insights in the book. This is page one of chapter one.
If this isn't happening in primary schools (and incidentally, it isn't) it is because successive governments have tied teachers' hands tighter and tighter behind their backs, clogged up their creative planning time with mindless paper trails of evidence and embraced an American style blame culture in which headteachers have no choice but add almost daily to the growing 'not list' of activities about which "risk assessment says no!"
Teaching these days is entirely about compliance and fear. Creativity has gone, teachers' professional judgements have eroded away and all that is left is a heavily prescribed curriculum, endless targets and the audacity of inspectors bestowed with the power to judge a lesson as being "'satisfactory' with elements of 'good'." When your pay and professional future depend on such judgments and the outcomes of test results, it takes a brave (or more likely subversive) teacher to take their pupils out for a tree climbing session. Unfortunately, subversive teachers rarely last in the profession because they realise they are banging their heads against the grand daddy of all brick walls.
My strap line to the forthcoming Gareth'll fix it series?
'GM points out what teachers intuitively know already, but have had beaten out of them by years of centralised government control.'
