A word for Mr Gove from the chalkface – please stop meddling and let us teach

AT the wrong end of a teaching career, I've lived a life of constant change. Over the last quarter of a century I've seen very little improvement, but lots and lots of politically inspired change.

The changes that really chill are the ones invented just to mark out difference. As a politician scent-marks their own career, a 100,000 school staff work untold hours replacing and undoing what a few years earlier they were told was vital, necessary, the only way.

"Snogging and praying" lessons, (sorry, "Personal, Social, Citizenship, Health Education") were about to be made compulsory under Labour. Now they aren't.

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The General Teaching Council was disbanded before I ever found out exactly what it did and I have, regrettably, spent many whimsical Ofsted hours since 2000 – completing forms S4, SEF, Revised SEF – with questions that came and went, came, went and came again.

Teaching is like being trapped on a hamster wheel with no possibility of getting off, and after 25 years I have just one ambition left – to leave.

There is no escape fantasy that I haven't lived out during meetings where others talk of meaningless ideas like "outcomes", "assessing pupil progress" and "self-evaluation frameworks". The words tumble into a mass grave of other people's agendas (and priorities).

It's now almost accepted that each new educational initiative will have a 10-year lifespan before it is culled. In 2000, split A-levels into two exams (AS and A2). Unless he slips on the pool of red ink correcting his buildings homework, 10 years on Michael Gove is poised to introduce fewer but harder exams.

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Grant maintained schools, directly funded by central government were a fabulous idea from 1988 until 1998 when it was decided that they weren't. Mr G has now offered academy status to maintained schools with the carrot of receiving their share of central funding that local authorities used to spend on their behalf. Nice to see that one back.

Building Schools for the Future went from flagship to scuppered wreck overnight, too. Sorry to everyone involved – your evenings, weekends, children's birthdays are not only lost but wasted. Let that be a lesson.

We now track pupils (with often spurious data) with a level of detail many orders of magnitude finer than our ability to change their actual school experience. It is like revealing fine details on a Faberg egg through a magnifying glass, then adjusting its hinge with a hammer.

I feel so sorry for Bacon, Shakespeare and Wordsworth that they never had the opportunity to be graded a thousand times before leaving education. Poor things. Just think what they would have achieved nowadays.

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It now seems to me that a significant portion of the people involved in our education system are employed to make it dysfunctional.

The trick I've never mastered after many years of trying is how to give the amount of work I do (about the same as any other deputy head) the appearance of being more than it is, because that in truth is what they want.

Teaching has become a game of smoke and mirrors. Honesty is curiously unvalued in an occupation supposedly about creating inquiring minds open to new ideas and alternative hypotheses. Orthodoxy is king. The vague phrase that "school x" and "person y" are "doing a lot of good work" substitutes for rigorous analysis and anyone objecting to yet another initiative is stereotyped as being against improvement.

The delusion that innovation is synonymous with greater achievement and higher standards is responsible for so very much wasted effort.

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A while ago, lessons were to have three parts – a starter, the teaching bit in the middle and a plenary to go over and embed the topic studied.

I was pleased with my three-part lessons, but someone told me they should have another part. Suddenly, the four-part lesson was the only possible way to teach. Currently, lessons have to have lots of parts, until someone notices the obvious – that too many parts eventually just become interruptions. Either three legs are good or they're not; teaching shouldn't be subject to fashions.

Government, local authorities, governors – they all think of task after task without the inconvenience of finding resources or time for us to do them.

At all levels of the teaching profession, the risk of whether or not an idea is achievable lies not with the person that thought of the idea, but with the person told to implement it.

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Nobody from the Secretary of State downwards ever says: "Sorry I asked you to do that. You couldn't possibly have fitted it in, and frankly it was a pretty dumb idea anyway. I doubt we'll be doing that one for the next five years."

I attended a Department for Children, Schools and Families (now the Department of Education – there's a widely held belief in Downing Street that a name change is as good as any actual policies) briefing about something a year or so ago. I have literally no idea what they were launching, because my brain had frozen at their slogan: Innovation Unit "Making Change Happen". They even used the aggravating

nonsense, "Work smarter, not harder". The weasel words shift the risk – if you fail, it isn't because the task was unreasonable; it is because you haven't worked smart enough. Your fault. Your risk.

In case it seems like I'm just a grouse, my last independent teaching grade under the Ofsted framework was 1 – Outstanding. I'm not moaning because I can't do any of this stuff. I am moaning because I don't want to, I don't believe in it, and I object to its ill thought-out and unrigorous imposition.

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Education needs a system where nothing anyone does to it can win or lose votes. Politicians won't stir a pot they can't feed out of. Also fewer people should be employed to advise, control, invent, monitor or otherwise barnacle-ise on schools.

I have one simple proposition, therefore, to make education sane. Any change to exams, funding, curriculum or inspection should be law for at least 20 years to make sure whatever is introduced is genuinely beneficial and to return some humanity to the lives of those charged with implementing it.

When I was at university, I dreamed of becoming a writer or

professional bass player. My girlfriend, now wife, had other ideas and, needing to earn money, I kind of fell into teaching. I may not have

arrived in the classroom with a burning vocation, but it has been an interesting, worthwhile career and I've fulfilled my role as deputy head with occasional flurries of success – possibly accidental.

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However, now before I go to work I watch the milk lady with envy. Buy milk. Deliver milk. Get paid for milk. Don't suppose anyone comes and makes her feel useless for not finding time to run a survey on the bovine voice or reprimands her for failing to get the cow's opinions on the dairy industry.

I wonder if her milk float has room for two...

(The writer wishes to remain anonymous)