My month in the classroom – Issue XXIII
The Government continually expects teachers to deal with problems of its (the Government's) making.
Cartoon by Crid.
This is an excerpt of an article that features in our 23rd print issue.
The school year began with two inset (training and preparation) days that made me realise for the first time the extent to which the Government expects teachers to deal with problems of its (the Government's) making. Instead of using the valuable time to prepare my classroom and upcoming lessons, I and all staff instead had to complete numerous training sessions that are a catalogue of the ills plaguing Tory Britain.
Here's how it goes: allow uncontrolled mass immigration from countries where female genital mutilation is rife, then make it a legal obligation for teachers to learn about and report it if they become so aware; allow uncontrolled mass immigration from Islamic countries, then force teachers to learn to spot signs of 'extremism' amongst both young Muslims and, as is always the case in the crude training videos, young white English males; make divorce easy and cheap, reward single parent families, and make lifelong heterosexual marriage almost meaningless, and force teachers to undergo rigorous 'safeguarding' training to spot the signs of abuse of children in dysfunctional households; create a litigious society of 'no win, no fee' lawsuits, then force teachers to pass 'Health and Safety' training so as to discourage any sort of risk taking.
To make matters worse, most training programmes are made within our own academy federation, allowing the right-on brigade to blend hectoring state querulousness with modish racialist drivel. In one of two sessions on 'safeguarding', for instance, I was told that the reason a non-white child might, say, throw a chair across the room is that, growing up, he or she may regularly have been given plasters meant to imitate caucasion skin, a "message" that is "subtle" but "detrimental". The narrator was equally adamant that excluding or suspending pupils for such behaviour "doesn't work". And of course, the day ended with "LGBTQ+ inclusion: pronoun training", supplemented by a mass distribution of rainbow-coloured lanyards.
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