Phil Beadle

Well that’s Brighton for you John! Some people are never able to give up.

I’m not sure, I think there are two sides to this one. I was never up for failing student teachers, or chucking them out of the profession before they’ve started. Whatever their motivations, they’ve turned up with a nice shirt on and, as an AST, that was pretty well good enough for me. I think there are too many experienced teachers who take a near sadistic joy out of failing student teachers. So, it’s a vice I never indulged in myself.

You’ve spent years developing a philosophy, and that’s to your credit, and will have informed your work. But there is another view; and that view is, “It’s only a bloody job.” I sympathise with both views, and don’t necessarily think that they are mutually exclusive.

As for senior management not liking children, it’s on the person specification I think. (That was a joke by the way).

My experience is in the inner cities, and I have never failed to be impressed by the human beings who work in such schools, take the abuse and grind out the possibility of different lives for working class kids. I think these teachers and managers are the best of us. And by that I don’t just mean the profession, I mean the species.

(Q3) On page 9 you write: “A good teacher will nurture a questioning spirit in a child, foster he doubt and give her the equipment she needs to challenge the certainties of previous generations… The process of learning should be exciting, enlivening and, more often than not, anarchic. It should ignite passions that will carry on into adult life.” I agree entirely with that. In the words of W. A. Ward: "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." Or as Ionesco put it: "It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question."

The problem is that the vast majority of teachers do not accept this philosophy. In fact, they are extremely hostile to the idea of students taking a questioning approach to their education. They see this as a threat to their authority. Douglas Barnes showed in his research (From Communication to Curriculum, 1972) that most teaching involves asking closed questions and that the role of the student is to “fill in the gaps” with knowledge that the teacher has already given them. Teachers will defend themselves by arguing that they know what the student has to learn. Giving the pressures of the national testing of students (and teachers) they have no option but to promote “rote” learning. How would you answer this viewpoint.

Ian Gilbert says something in ‘Essential Motivation in the Classroom’ along the lines of, “Bad news I’m afraid, the culmination of six million years of neurological evolution is not the GCSE.” He also refers to most teacher led discussions as being a game, the real name of which is, ‘guess what’s in the teacher’s head.’

Aside from what constitutes a decent jacket for a social occasion, I agree with Mr Gilbert on most things. However, in my experience British teachers – particularly in inner city comps, all want to be as good as they can be, and if you point out that ‘fill the gaps’ isn’t doing anything for them or their charges, they’ll quickly try out other suggestions.

I never actually found myself stymied or frustrated by the demands of exam boards. If you see teaching in the same way as perhaps a poet might see a poem, you work within constraints (rhyme scheme specific sub genre, etc.) and it is the discipline of working within those that helps you to create interesting, new work. But I can see that the pressure for teachers to ‘obey’ is pretty heavy at the moment, and it takes a bit of guts to see most of the mass produced dictates and curriculum materials for the crud they are, and go off and do your own thing. I was lucky, I came to the profession late, with plenty of chipped teeth. I think, without a decent mentor, it is probably quite difficult for younger teachers to retain the sense of excitement, anarchy and wonder that makes a great teacher without it being rushed within their first year by the myriad forces to conform.

(Q2) You claim that schools tend to treat children as “battery hens” and this form of education is both “dehumanizing and destructive” (page 6). I agree and this is one of the main reasons I left teaching. To a certain extent, schools have always played this function. James Kay Suttleworth, one of the pioneers of state education argued that it would help to rear “the population in obedience to the laws, in submission to their superiors, and to fit them to strengthen the institutions of their country”. Or as R. H. Tawney put it: “a system devised by one class for the discipline of another.” It is the reason why Karl Marx was so much against the idea of state education.

Things actually improved in the 1960s and 1970s when teachers gained a lot of freedom in the way they taught. However, the reforms in the 1980s changed all that: the tyranny of SATs, Ofsted, government targets, league tables, etc.. I started my life working on the factory floor and by the 1990s I felt I had returned to the production line. One of the consequences of the educational reforms was that most creative teachers left the profession. That is why I predicted on the “Unteachables” thread that you would leave the classroom in a couple of years. I don’t think it is possible to work within a system that so harms the educational development of our young people. Do you think it is possible? Is this why you have left the classroom?

Schools CAN treat children as battery hens (and by this I mean the institutions, not the teachers), but they don’t have to. For me, the advent of league tables has caused a narrowing of focus, which needs to be remedying. Good exam results give schools permission to ignore the creative needs of children, and as a result, the version of education churned out in the grammars, for instance; and particularly in the independents, is the spewing of facts into children that was regarded as outmoded in Dickens’ time.

I think we have a real problem in wrongly ascribed value here in Britain. The path to ‘success’ followed by the academies and the ‘livery’ company schools is a reversion to an idealised version of Britain that, thankfully, doesn’t exist anymore. Kids are forced to wear arcane uniforms, take part in near Masonic rituals, pay obedience without question; all in half arsed imitation of the class riddled environs of Oxbridge. Much of New Labour educational reform is all about reinstating deference and much of it sickens me.

Until such time as some government or other has the stomach to reverse the structural and institutionalized inequalities in our system, then any talented, creative teacher will be find themselves in an equation where the energy they expend is not equal to the learning they generate. The ‘choice’ agenda, for instance, is entirely wrong headed. Given the choice human beings will ghettoize themselves. This, combined, with allowing the church an ever increasing say in how children are indoctrinated means that, somewhat ironically, the government are fighting versions of religious fundamentalism on other shores, all the time using educational policy to ensure there will be an ever increasing amount of such fundamentalism for them to deal with on home territory in future generations.

I don’t want to come over all John Taylor Gatto though. This stuff has no bearing on why I am not teaching in schools this week. That decision was entirely fiscal and temporary. I’ll be back down the supply with my tail between my legs by late October.

(Q1) The book appears to be aimed at parents. In an ideal world parents should play a large role in the educating of their children. However, in modern Britain, with people spending long hours at work, do parents have the time to spend educating their children? Sure, parents feel they should be doing this, but does this mean that the book will sell but spend most of the time on their coffee tables?

I think it’s entirely possible that some parents might buy the book at the beginning of a new term in the spirit of really getting engaged in their child’s educational progress, only to find that they’re too knackered at the end of the day. (I’m not sure it’d make too much of a coffee table book though. Given the choice of Nigella Lawson or my gurning mug staring up at you from the sitting room table, I wouldn’t be plumping for the schoolteacher).

It’s not the kind of book though that you read cover to cover. It’s more for dipping into occasionally in order to pick up an interesting creative idea or perspective. I buy a lot of music, and I’d like it to work in the way that some music does. You buy it. Think little of it initially, but return to it a month, a year, two years later; so that it eventually inveigles its way into your consciousness.

The ideas in it can be applied with little effort on the part of parents. And that little effort, as I’ve found with my own kids, brings disproportionate reward. As an example, I’ve tried all the techniques in the book on my nine-year-old son. Last week he came up with ‘devalued’ on a triple word score in Scrabble; and, you know, successful in Scrabble – successful in life.

Phil Beadle has been described as ‘The country’s most inspirational teacher’ (The Times) and ‘An emerging national hero’ (The Observer). He spent a decade working in one of the toughest schools in the toughest part of London’s east End, producing results from his students which were little short of miraculous. In 2002 his GCSE literature class all gained A grades.

He was awarded London Secondary School Teacher of the Year in 2004, going on to win the National title.

He is the only teacher ever to have a regular column in a national newspaper, producing laugh out loud articles for The Guardian, which take a barbed look at youth, education and government policy. He has also written leaders on government policy for the same newspaper, being held in sufficiently high regard as a journalist to have been asked to substitute for the great Ted Wragg: a position Phil describes as ‘like sending on an Accrington Stanley reserve for Ronaldinho.”

Beadle appeared in the Channel 4 series The Unteachables, where he took a group of challenging children and, somehow, achieved the impossible, getting them to re-engage with education. The Guardian said of him, ‘He looks and talks like Dirty Den, and he’s a genius’, and he won an award for on screen talent from the Royal Society of Television. He wrote and presented a 30 Minutes Piece for Channel 4 attacking Private Schooling, has appeared on Newsnight, The Politics Show, The Heaven & Earth Show, Richard & Judy and This Morning.

His book Could Do Better is the fastest selling educational advice book of all time, and he has just finished filming a major documentary series for Channel 4 on adult literacy.