Parents know which are the worst teachers at their kids’ schools. Even the kids know. No matter what the Principal might tell you, they know too. They just don’t seem to do much about it.
My ten-year-old daughter will finish Year 5 this term. Year 5 is an important year that establishes a lot of groundwork for future learning. The Education Department even has a strategy that recognises the importance of these ‘middle years’, but that didn’t stop them sticking my daughter in a classroom with an incompetent teacher for almost an entire year – a year that my daughter and her classmates will never get back.
As soon as we found out which class my daughter would be in this year, we knew we were in trouble. Friends with older children shook their heads sadly and said we should do everything we could to get her into a different class, or even a different school! We can’t afford private school fees, and my daughter is a shy kid who struggled to make friends. She has one good friend at school who is in the same class, which was one of the reasons the Principal gave for not moving her immediately when we complained at the start of the year.
It was obvious from the start that the teacher wasn’t up to the job. My daughter, who had always enjoyed school, described an increasingly rowdy and disrupted classroom, with disorganised and confusing lessons. The teacher was frequently off sick, which meant day after day of short-term casual teachers asking the kids what they’d been learning and letting them watch movies for half the day. Strangely, the teacher was never sick on sport days, or assembly days.
We complained to the Principal several times, and I know that other parents did the same. My daughter was becoming increasingly disinterested in school. Her homework was mostly badly photocopied pages of questions, but she didn’t seem to have learned the skills to complete the sheets. We spent more and more time at home teaching our daughter the things she was supposed to be learning at school. At the parent-teacher night, we tried to talk to the teacher about our daughter’s struggles with her classwork and homework. The teacher told us that our daughter was ‘on track’ and ‘ahead of the game’.
At the end of Term 2, when my daughter and several other kids in the class brought home disappointing results in mid-year exams, I complained again to the Principal. He told me that the school took my concerns seriously and that the teacher would receive additional professional development and support to help her improve her teaching the following term.
This just meant even more time with the teacher out of the classroom, while well-meaning casual teachers did their best one or two days at a time. Concerned parents joined forces and approached the Principal to plead for a change. The Principal told us that the teacher had just completed a five week program of support and advice, and that her performance would continue to be assessed over the next five weeks. He said that the teacher was working to improve and develop her teaching skills and that the school had to give her a fair go by supporting her through that process.
Five weeks later, the teacher had been absent for almost three weeks and we were well into Term 4. The same group of parents went again to see the Principal in total despair, only to be told that the teacher had retired, that recruitment for a permanent replacement would commence immediately, and that a casual teacher would continue to cover the vacancy, possibly for the rest of the school year.
We were stunned and appalled. How could the school have knowingly squandered an entire year of our children’s education so cruelly? Schools are supposed to provide development opportunities for students, not teachers.
We don’t have a lot of money, but we work hard and pay taxes. Our daughter deserves a fair go at a good education. Somehow that seems to matter a lot less than a fair go for lousy teachers whose careers can drag on for years, damaging children, before finally quitting, presumably to avoid getting sacked. This is what really ‘needs improvement’!
