My friend just got his black belt.
While he’d love it to be of the Karate Kid variety, it is actually because of his ninja skills in the world of ‘process improvement’ – in short, he is an expert at making engineering projects more efficient. And, while the title of the award gives us all a giggle (cue Bruce Lee quotes), achieving this standard has bumped up his status (and pay packet) as a highly respected professional. It was hard to achieve but is portable on his CV, respected by his peers and keeps him on the frontline of his profession not tucked away in an office higher up the management chain. He is only trumped by his wife – she is chartered, but it’s a sore point so we don’t talk about that.
David Blunkett started a way of recognising teachers in this way (less excitingly known as advanced skills teachers) following a pledge in the 1997 manifesto, but the scheme was canned in 2013. The main reason cited was that schools now have the freedom to set the pay for those teachers who had demonstrated particular expertise.
When the evidence suggests that: an education system can never be better than the quality of its teachers; the best teachers are often promoted out of the classroom; and, teachers tend to plateau once they have been qualified for around five years, this was, in my view, a big mistake. The value in continuing to recognise the immense skills of our best teachers is in the recognition itself. Ministers are off the mark if they think this was about freedoms and pay.
So, if like me you the AST policy had merit why should the profession not take the reins and bring ASTs 2.0 to life. If there was appetite, what would we need to do?
- Create an independent organisation, led by a board of experts and house some amazing practitioners within it. Give it some funding. Massive government bureaucracy this is not.
- Support the board, and the experts to consult with the profession and develop a set of standards for our own black belt. I will leave the detail of these standards to those better qualified than I am (I suspect the AST standards would be a good place to start) but in short the bar should be so high that you basically need present multiple videos of different groups of children on the tables, on different days doing the whole ‘my captain’ routine to pass – one of the days should be a really windy Friday, towards the end of term when there is a full moon.
- Create a robust but positive assessment process that feels great for those going through it as it builds in opportunities for feedback to the practitioner. Over time, introduce peer review by those already holding their black belts.
- Recognise these black belts each year with a fancy awards ceremony to raise their profile and then shape them into a movement – connected by their shared belief that it’s the quality of teaching that matters to kids, particularly those vulnerable to underachievement, not structures, processes or policy gimmicks.
- Send them back out into the system to share their wisdom, now recognised as the real driver for school improvement.
- Top up their salaries in recognition of this work – paid direct to the teacher from the independent organisation, not drawn from school budgets.
- Build in revalidation process so that every five years stepping those who pass up to ‘first dan’. All those awarded need to keep those children stood on those desks – letting standards slip will not do.
We complain constantly that the profession is not properly recognised, that it is run down by ministers, and that their focus is on the wrong things. This might just be an opportunity to take that power back, enable to the profession to recognise its own experts, and focus on what we know will improve the lives of the children in our care.
———————————-
Matthew Hood is a director of a national education charity and assistant head at a secondary school in Morecambe
———————————-
I just do not know about this – OK yes of course reward good teachers but this above seems to me too individualistic not sufficiently systematic. In secondary education (and FE) we do need to attract well qualified graduates with good honours degrees because in my experience such people are smart at teaching, at communicating effectively, at team work, at organising schools with high expectations and cutting out the latest bullsh*t which gets in the way of raising standards and delivering an effective curriculum.
Weak schools often have ineffective management that has low expectations of working class kids and weak teachers; high turnover, supply teachers, semi-qualified, little experience , lower qualifications, little homework, poor A level results. We need to flood our secondary schools with well rewarded good graduates who can deliver what is required for good results. We have to break the class thing where schools fall by the way because middle class parents bypass them and too often so do good teachers. Clear out the dead wood in our weaker schools reward smart graduates just like we do in private and good comprehensives.