This is just a short blog on the back of discussions I had yesterday evening about Teaching and Learning policies in secondary schools. I posted out some extracts from T&L policies from a couple of different schools, which (in my view): manage to place students at the heart of the teaching experience; set out broad principles for why teaching is important; promote wider aspects of good teaching; and are not overly prescriptive in terms of pedagogy.

The reaction to this post was very interesting. On the one hand, the examples got a handful of "likes" but there was quite a lot of criticism too:

So the latest furore which has erupted in the world of teaching is a suggestion by the Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, that teachers should be licensed in order to stay in the profession, and that a Royal College of Teaching be set up. In an interview with the BBC Hunt noted that teacher should have "the same professional standing" as lawyers and doctors, "which means re-licensing themselves, which means continued professional development, which means being the best possible they can be," (Of course, if Hunt is serious about giving teaching "the same professional standing" as law and medicine, he might want to consider the pay and conditions of teaching as well as the licensing aspect!). He went on to say that "if you're not willing to engage in re-licensing to update your skills then you really shouldn't be in the classroom,"

Twitter seems to have exploded with anger at the proposals:

The AndAllThat.co.uk teacher blog is moving from WordPress onto the main website. From now on you will find non-topic related content here. 

You can still access the archives from the WordPress site by visiting http://andallthatweb.wordpress.com . I will endeavour to transfer the content over the next few months.

Mr F

Rationale
It has been claimed that the last decade has seen a crisis of leadership within education (Gronn, 2003a). Teachers appear to be shunning extra responsibilities and remaining in the classroom. The great monolithic school systems, based on nineteenth century corporations, with their complex and rigid hierarchies have begun to crumble. It seemed no great surprise to many observers (Gunter, 2002; Wrigley 2003) that this should be the case. Both of these authors have argued that schools have been squeezed into a corporate model of governance designed for business rather than education. Indeed, as White (2011) notes, the notion of a complex corporate hierarchy was most likely flawed from its very inception, a tool for corrupt men to turn a quick profit, obscured behind bureaucratic systems.