Special?

 What makes a school special?

We will have to look at the basics of the profession. Teaching and learning must be the centre of all endeavour in a school. When the focus shifts to other aspects, the imbalance is quickly felt.

The management of any school must understand that the role is to promote learning in the best conditions. They have to understand that the working conditions of the teachers is the learning conditions of the students. Management, and most of them come from a teaching background, have the duty to stay in touch with the theories and practicalities of the classroom practice. The physical place has to facilitate learning and teaching. The teachers have to have the necessary expertise to conduct their daily business in an efficient and knowledgeable way. Experienced teachers may not be better than the newly qualified ones but experience teaches them how to deal with issues, how to foresee problems and quickly plan a new strategy to remedy them. Experience, whether with time or training, is what has been the absolute value throughout centuries of institutionalised education.

WCC and the new people taking up the most senior roles must understand what the crisis is about. It is primarily about the lack of trust in management and lack of time to teach in a positive environment and in an efficient way. They must look at the planning of the school terms, the daily teaching load, the daily learning expectations. More to come on this in a new publication.

Trust is the cladding of learning and teaching. Students must trust their teachers are really engaged with the process and happy to be in the classroom with them. Parents must trust their children are learning and safe in the learning environment. Teachers must trust they are valued and given the time to do their job properly. Management must trust their teachers are well-meaning and that mistakes must be used to learn from the experience and not an opportunity to settle scores.

When WCC teachers feel disenfranchised, used, lied to, punished and pushed to the bottom of the pile, they lose faith in their environment. The new building becomes the new confinement, the new school structure becomes the new hurdle, the new initiative becomes the new forced labour.

So, what makes WCC special?

The experienced teachers are leaving as they know from experience that things are deteriorating and no solution is in sight. The new teachers are not listened to. The students are becoming aware of the issues and losing faith in their learning. Remember, the working conditions of the teachers is the learning conditions of the students. The management level is so out of touch that they continue to feel embarrassed and inadequate in their roles. Some of them are simply inept. 

WCC has always been a business. Let's get that out of the way. WCC is not teaching for the sake of teaching. The school has to make money. The current management has been trying to keep the school afloat financially but we all know the level of debt is so high that the school needs to make further cuts and savings. Brace yourselves for what to come. WCC is no longer special or above other schools. With the rising living costs: rent, school fees and flights. The high salary compared to the UK is no longer a compelling one.

So, what about teaching and learning in this current context? As the focus shifted from quality of learning to a marketing exercise, the vulnerable have become more vulnerable. Students are feeling disengaged and feel they are there only to produce good grades - and that has been the reason of the grade tempering by management. Teachers are feeling disengaged as they can see the futility of their efforts to teach in a productive way. The moment they show signs of disagreement or discontent, they are discredited, punished, ignored and buried under more tasks to do. The blog is the result of the abusive policies and behaviour of Dr Zimmer and Robocop. They may feel hard done by but all of this happened on their watch. Had the teachers been respected, they would have worked with them to make things better.

WCC is a British sponsored school. With the flagrant disregard for British values like commonsense, respect of individuals and preservation of human dignity, it is not understood what connection the school has with its sponsor. WCC is neither run on British institutional values nor can claim it advances societal semblance to its would-be sovereign country. What we have seen over the last few years is the 1950s behind the iron curtain style management which advances an anachronistic style of education.

So what makes WCC special?

Sharks, it seems.