and when the public lost patience with them the Third Reich took advantage and steam-rollered in the dreaded National Curriculum which imposed a syllabus that curbed her own pedagogical freedoms that produced excellent results
thank you very much
hot on its heels were the League Tables and with that came a whole raft of computerized data entry, form-filling, stats, inspections and pointless, mandatory after-school staff meetings twice a week, even when there was nothing to discuss
then Gestapo HQ enforced lesson plans, a new swear word in Shirley’s ever-expanding canon: National Curriculum! league tables! lesson plans!
all of which left no room for responding to the fluctuating needs of a classroom of living, breathing, individualized children
nor could she freely write school reports any more, which she’d actually enjoyed, commenting on her pupils’ progress, letting their parents know she was looking out for their child
instead she had to tick boxes according to a list of generic statements
she could no longer say, for example, that a child’s handwriting had improved, making their work more legible and therefore higher gradable because she had encouraged the child to sit straight, concentrate and write slower
or that a child was no longer disruptive as the class clown but had channelled their comic ability into the drama group, at her suggestion, and had shone in a school production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
unless such a question existed
which it never did
then the Gestapo demanded each pupil produce a Folder of Good Work every year, carefully handwritten from their classwork or homework, which took up hours of valuable teaching time and stressed the kids out no end, to be kept in a file in case a parent or a child’s new school asked to see it
guess what?
no one ever did
what was she?
a Cog in the Wheel of Bureaucratic Madness
when Shirley drove up to the school in the mornings
moments before the inmates charged up the Paupers’ Path to destroy any sense of equilibrium
its monstrous proportions settled in her stomach
like concrete
and as the eighties became history the nineties couldn’t wait to charge in and bring more problems than solutions
more
children at school coming from families struggling to cope
more
unemployment, poverty, addiction, domestic violence at home
more
kids with parents who were ‘inside’, or should have been
more
kids who needed free school meals
more
kids who were on the Social Services register or radar
more
kids who went feral – (she
wasn’t
an animal tamer)
by the time the new millennium pitched up, knives large enough to disembowel rhinos were discovered in school rucksacks during what became regular spot-check inspections
pistols were hidden down socks
gang recruitment agencies, or as good as, loitered outside the school gates
a bustling drugs market in the school grounds replaced the tuck shop
there were increased sexual assaults on girls and more girls becoming mothers when they were still children themselves
the school installed a metal detector at the gate and security guards, passcodes were introduced for all doors and cameras appeared in the corridors
to each graduating class, she resisted the urge to offer advice on prison visiting times for their families, as opposed to encouraging them go on to further education
especially to the low-lifes, weirdos, sub-70 IQs (eugenics? love it!), potential serial killers and other deranged psychos who sat at the back of her classes and made such a racket that she, of all people, had to shout to be heard
she, who once had such exceptional class control she was asked to mentor junior teachers in the art of cultivating a quiet authority
an authority where her word was once God, now if kids fucked with her, she fucked with them back
because of your behaviour, the entire class will have to stay behind after school
now she worried that one of the ‘Category A’ contingent would stab or shoot her as she walked alone past the hedges in the car park on a dark winter’s afternoon
worst of all was the school’s most promising Lifer-in-Waiting in Year 11, Johnny Ronson, whose sole purpose was to undermine her authority whenever she told him off for disrupting class
one time rubbing his crotch so that his prick stood up under his trousers
it was her word against his
no evidence, no witnesses
the little bastard
if only she could send these brats back to when the school was a workhouse, make them spend a day or two crushing stones to make roads or bones to make fertilizer
slave labour twelve hours a day for bread and gruel and a hard, blanketless floor to sleep on
the number of times she told them how generations of reformers and campaigners, unionists and clergy, do-gooders, writers, politicians in the Houses of Parliament and peers in the House of Lords had fought for their right to better themselves through education
she told them until she was bored of repeating herself
it
never
went
in
furthermore, after decades of religiously marking homework five nights a week, she now loathed doing it with a venom
piles of crap piled up on her study desk produced by mostly semi-literates who made her life hell in the classroom
mixed ability classrooms? to think she once approved, it didn’t raise standards, it lowered them
on this she and Penelope Halifax agreed
the strangest thing was that after many years avoiding each other, they bonded at being overlooked by the new crowd of teachers who now ran the show
they’d sit in the staff room together as youngsters of all races bounded about full of themselves, ignoring both of them as irrelevant antiquities
in spite of the fact that Penny was considerably older than Shirley
they particularly hated the naïve young graduates who bounced in at the start of every term with their PhDs and espousing their show-off ‘constructivist’ teaching theories
all ideology and no experience – wankers
wankers-wankers-wankers, she and Penny would mutter to each other under their breath, gloating as over the years the newbies either left or had the life sucked out of them
they loved it when a twenty-two-year-old rookie teacher who’d arrived as a fashionista size six began to trudge around wearing trousers with elasticated waists
join the club, dearie! Penny whispered to Shirley, and they’d collapse, ignoring the curious glances of their fellow teachers
who wondered why these two relics were having such fun
Shirley and Penny sat there with their sandwiches and moaned about the good old days when teaching wasn’t over-bureaucratized and the kids weren’t murdering each other in turf wars
when Penelope retired, her greatest ally was gone
Shirley wanted to leave for the private sector, a girls’ independent populated by polite middle-class girls (preferably under thirteen) who knew how to say please and thank you and knew better than to get in teacher’s bad books
she wanted teacher-pleasers, that’s the truth of it
not gun-wielding, gum-chewing, coke-sniffing, up-the-duff, scumbag gangster thugs
she wanted girls whose parents ‘helped’ them so much with their homework they appeared to be child prodigies, the great middle-class scam she and Lennox had themselves perpetrated with their own two daughters
that’s what she was now, middle-class herself
in which case, middle classes über alles!
the sticking point was the hard-won Education Act of 1944 that made school free for all children had been been the subject of her thesis at university