THE DECLINE OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Mary Kenny on the growing belief among teachers

that they are not respected, and the growing belief among parents that teachers do not deserve respect

MY GRANDPARENTS were school- teachers in a small town — more like a village, really — in the west of Ireland. Before the first world war, they earned, between the two of them, about £200 a year, with which they raised six children, including two sons who became doctors, Which was the ultimate social accolade. When my grandmother gave birth to a child, she paid for a substitute teacher to take her classes for the duration. Such was maternity leave. Such, in- lew, was what they call covering' today. The teacher hired the 'cover' personally! It was accepted that teachers were not well paid. Shopkeepers were the ones with the money. Thus when the rebellion broke out in 1916 in Dub- lin, my grandmother was excited by the news, but all that John Glynn, the shopkeeper, could worry about were the delays in goods deliveries by train. Teachers thought this was typical of shopkeepers: the great events of history passed by, and all they fretted over was the tupp- ence ha'penny in the till. You could, in those days, put on quite grand airs without necessarily earning very much money, and teachers were snobbish about shopkeepers (from which derives a lamentable disdain, today, for `commerce'). If a social wage could be said to include invisible rewards such as the respect of society, teachers en- lOYed the reward of respect. They were hteratepeople. They could read and write Latin, sometimes Greek. People came to leachers for references. When there was trouble in the village, the teachers, the Priest and the doctor would form a con- clave together. In the case of what we IyouId now call a battered wife, my grand- father and the priest between them man- aged to whisk the woman and her children Off to America. Nowadays, living in London, I receive little notes from my children's teachers to say that this or that school event will not be taking place because of the teachers' con- tinuing protestations about their conditions of work. For although the teachers' strike — which has dribbled on for nearly two years — has been theoretically settled, there is still no agreement about extra duties such as lunch-time supervision or after-hours activities like running chess clubs, organising Saturday morning games and meeting parents in the evenings. In these little notes from the teachers, refer- ence is usually made to the modesty of their incomes (£460 a month is a typical take-home pay packet), and also, with a poignant air of self-pity, to the 'general lack of respect for teachers in our society today'. There are over half a million teachers in Britain and it is impossible to generalise about so large and disparate a group, but I would nevertheless say that most teachers believe that the Thatcher administration has little or no regard for education. That the Government just does not care. 'Except of course in the most utilitarian sense of the word — they don't mind training people up to work in compu- ters or to make money.' I occasionally de- tect in the reflections of modern teachers a flavour of my grandparents' contempt for commerce and the shopkeeping roots. A contempt for money-making and a certain grandeur about the cost of things goes ill with repeated requests for more money and claims about being under-valued.

But the feeling of being under-valued goes much deeper, with teachers, than money can account for. Money is just the symbol, probably because money is the only real measure now whereby value can be ex- pressed: if we admire peo- ple or have consideration for what they do, we give them money. If we wish to express condolences, we give money tragedies are often marked by setting up a campaigning fund. Mis- fortune or accident is compensated for — by money. Money talks, and sometimes it is the only way we have of talking, it seems. The teacher today does not have the social position, such as it was, that he enjoyed in former times (though it was not, I think, quite as respected a think, quite as respected a role in England as it was in the Celtic coun- tries). He is far from being, today, a re- pository of knowledge that places him at an advantage. His one traditional perk — lon- ger holidays — has been eroded in com- parison with other professions.

And the teacher's role, that of being the Mr Chips or the Miss Jean Brodie in some child's life, the person who forms young minds, who gains a kind of immortality by becoming someone's most unforgettable character — that too is under severe com- petitive strain. Television is a key to many discontents, including teaching. 'Their teachers are Attenborough and Bellamy,' says a weary vetern of teaching in a com- prehensive in Hackney. Modern kids may spend five hours a day in a classroom, but they will be spending 30 hours a week or so in front of the television. The television can give them a one-to-one experience, plus all the tricks. What the classroom teacher can offer seems small stuff by comparison.'

Besides being a competitor, as well as an adjunct in the provision of knowledge, television has had other effects too. Thera is, I think, a largely agreed consensus that concentration has diminished because of television. 'Television has given children a wider knowledge, of course, in that they know lots of things about space, for exam- ple,' says a primary teacher who began her career in 1959. 'A wider knowledge, but a more superficial knowledge. They don't listen as much. It has also made them less passive. They are more challenging to authority. Parents are less passive too.' This teacher recalls an evening in 1960 when parents of a North Kensington school were invited to meet the class teacher to discuss their children's progress. From a class of 40, just one parent turned up. `Nowadays parents come into the school much more. They are more demanding. They back up their children much more too.'

This has both a positive and a negative side. In former times, if a child was scolded (or beaten) at school, he would in turn be scolded (or beaten) at home for having had to be reprimanded in the first place. Nowadays if a child is ticked off in school, the parent is more likely to take the child's side, occasionally responding with threats to the teacher. Like everyone else in the world, parents have developed a more litigious, 'I-know-my-rights' approach. One teacher in Essex who threatened to suspend a particularly recalcitrant fourth- form boy was faced by the boy's angry father the next day. 'I know my rights,' said the parent. 'I'll have the National Council for Civil Liberties on to you.'

Teachers in the State sector (the six per cent of children who attend independent schools live by different customs) now feel more involvement with parents, but expect more trouble from them, and more chal- lenges too. Sometimes, as well, the teacher has to compensate for parental deficien- cies. Among other increases of responsibil- ity that teachers shoulder is the matter of pastoral care. The teacher who recalled starting off in 1959 would have counted perhaps two children in a class of 40 coming from single-parent households. Now, in city areas, it is routine for a quarter of the pupils to come from single- parent homes. Many single parents are very conscientious, but on the whole, single-parent children require more care and attention. 'They need loving care and a greater number today require this basic emotional sympathy.'

And then there is the increase in the number of children for whom English is a second language. And the dispersal of the family — grandmothers, as well as mothers, are now likely to be busily out at work. And a curriculum which is 'child- centred' — that is to say, designed for the convenience of the child rather than the teacher, and thus requiring more effort from the teacher for each individual child. And then there are the bureaucratic re- quirements: teachers are being called to attend anti-sexist and anti-racism courses, and their teaching material is monitored for sexist and racist sources (Mark Twain falls into this category).

Add to all that a falling child population. This might seem in the interest of teachers at first: an opportunity, surely, to provide smaller classes. But it has not worked out that way. Falling school rolls tend to mean fewer schools and less promotion for teachers, less mobility in the profession generally, and more frustration.

Thus an inner-city teacher today is coping with more disruptive children from more disturbed and multilingual back- grounds, expected to offer a more indi- vidualistic kind of curriculum as well as a higher degree of pastoral care. The inner city school-teacher is, in the words of one, `a social worker, policeman, jailer, priest, psychiatric nurse and mother'. All for £192 a week (the average income, after the latest rise). 'It's not something you boast about, being a teacher,' says the primary school lady, who essentially likes her job, but keeps her own counsel about it. 'It certainly doesn't carry much status.' The Guardian itself expressed unconsciously what it really thought about the status of teachers in a recent article about the fashionable poetess Wendy Cope. 'She had aimed low in career terms after leaving Oxford,' said the celebrated Woman's Page. 'But she knew she could do more than merely teach.'

Even in the areas where one might expect a certain degree of complacency, the malaise among teachers is palpable. `You cannot get away from the feeling that everything is running down,' said a history master at highly-rated comprehensive school in quiet, steady, Tory-voting, upwardly-mobile, and characteristically white Orpington in Kent. The discontent over conditions, the feeling that there are never enough books or equipment, that the copying machine is over-used and con- stantly breaking down, that there are no blinds on the windows and no proper storage space — all this makes for a feeling of impoverishment, of neglect, of being part of something that is, irrevocably, on the decline. Conversation in the staff-room so often returns to this problem of money. `I can't afford anything,' says a 29-year-old Scale 1 teacher, earning about £9,000 a year. 'I'm overdrawn every single month, with no prospect of ever getting out of this debt. I'm married but we can't afford to have a family. You just can't afford to live on the salary.' Except, of course, if you are married to someone who is earning more. Which is why teaching is not regarded as such a bad deal if it is the second income in a two-income family. The male teacher married to a prosperous dentist, the woman married to a steady businessman these were among the teachers I noted most content with the job. 'It's a nice enough job for a married woman,' said a Pakistani woman, innocent of the fury that such remarks provoke in feminists and trade unionists. For this is indeed one of the reasons why teaching has fallen behind in the pay league: a marked increase in the numbers of married woman entering into any profession tends to depress pay levels, because married woman have been more inclined to see their salary as a sup- plementary one (and also, possibly, be- cause they have had less time for trade union militancy). What has unquestionably been eased in the daily lives of teachers — as a consequ- ence, indeed, of the strike — is the obligation to undertake so-called 'volun- tary' duties. Almost every teacher I know in the state sector swears that there will never be a return to the status quo ante. `No more after-school chess club. No more Saturday mornings sacrificed for the chil- dren's sports activities. No more evenings given over to school activities.' Not With- out substantial financial compensation, anyway, and that is not forthcoming. The expectation that teachers would always perform these customary duties was exploiting their good will to some extent. Teachers have entered the cash economY. Pastoral care seems to be on the way out in state schools, just at a time when some parents are also providing less pastoral care.

But, paradoxically, in the schools which work well parents are doing more rather than less to bolster the education of their children. The parental contribution to 'ex- tras' in the state system — raising funds to buy equipment and books — has risen by 170 per cent in the last seven years. It would seem that in the good state schools parental involvement is improving, where- as in the bad ones family problems general ly are making more demands on the teachers. Shortage of books is a wide", spread complaint now. In the good schools, the parents are just breaking the copyright law busily by photocopying the texts of books for better circulation. A teacher in a 'social priority' city school — what used to be called a sink school said that she never now asked children if their mothers knew what they were up to- Some of them seldom saw their mothers- Families are broken up, children are living in all sorts of circumstances. In this particu- lar school, there was normally a staff of six in the maths and science department. Three teachers had left — one to become a taxi-driver, one to run a pub, and one to join a computer firm for a hugely increased salary. (Maths teachers are being lured into computers very successfully.) And one teacher was on sick leave, having a nervous breakdown. Yet the supply teacher who was coping with all these difficulties was a very happy person. 'The children are very naughty, they go out stealing at lunchtime, they exist on a diet of Coke and crisps. They can't concentrate, half the time you're not teaching, you're just policing and yet, somehow, they are wonderful. I love them.' This teacher earned £530 a month take-home pay, but her worth must be priceless. There are still teachers like that.

In conversation with teachers generally, however, there is this persistent theme that the Government must do, more for educa- tion — often accompanied by a suspicion that there is a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the present Government to run down the public sector. It is not just that they feel that teachers should be better paid: it is also that they think more money should be spent everywhere on education. Of course some teachers actually dissent. A man who taught in Brixton for six years declared: 'No matter how much money you put into that school, you couldn't solve the problems. They go too deep.' For education needs some radical changes and re-thinking: patching up will not do. The most valuable idea for chang- ing the system of education seems to me to be. the one put forward by Oliver Letwin, former adviser to Mrs Thatcher, about the self-management of schools. Self- management would solve so many of the difficulties which beset education at the moment. Under a self-management scheme, each headmaster would receive his own budget to run his own school, from public sources. Then he would decide, Possibly with the aid of a school bursar, how the money is to be spent: how much teachers are to be paid: how much they can afford on heating, equipment, mainten- ance and extra-curricular activities. (`State schools are always over-heated,' says the Hackney teacher, 'because no teacher knows the cost of heating them.') Give a school financial autonomy and you give it Pride, a sense of identity and an incentive to good housekeeping. It is pathetic,' today, to hear a headmas- ter moan school about the poor conditions in his — the peeling paintwork, the rust- ing window-frames, the litter and the graffiti. In a school of 1,000 pupils and 50 teachers, does no one care enough to do some repairs personally? Is there no de- corator, no do-it-yourself bricoleur, no builder or painter anywhere in the com- munity who might lend a hand? Sure, depressed schools are depressed by defini- tion: the teachers are having nervous breakdowns and the parents aren't up to organising themselves. But it is just poss- ible that the self-management of schools Would encourage more robust folk to get Tv_olved even in the real problem schools. Self-management could cut out much wasteful bureaucracy and administration, so teachers could be paid more too. And there would be no need for 'assessment' which promises to be yet another bureaucratic money-eater, involving the expansion of another inspectorate. In the market system, assessment takes care of itself: people who are good are hired, people who are not so good are not so much hired.

And that is of course why the teachers' unions are against self-management because it will inevitably mean that dif- ferentials will occur. It is always more difficult to engage maths and science teachers than any other kind, therefore it is necessary to pay them more. It might also mean that parents would be more inclined to judge schools by results, and that autonomy would mean more competition. This is considered anti-egalitarian. And self-management might inhibit ex- perimental approaches to education, too. It may well be too radical a suggestion for the politicians. The present Govern- ment is quite the same as all the others in wanting to retain control of whatever they can in the area of education. Sir Keith Joseph has shown no desire to devolve educational powers, and recently turned down quite sensible proposals that polytechnics should have more independ- ence. The natural tendency of all politi- cians and all bureaucrats is towards hang- ing on to power. So although self- management would almost certainly im- prove general levels of educational stan- dards, and both the salaries and the status of teachers; although it would be easier to organise than more complicated initiatives such as school vouchers — the political will is not yet developed for it. But the propos- al is certainly worth pursuing.

Tell me, 0 Teacher, they address their spiritual leaders in the great religions, and that is what 'rabbi' means. And it is this regard that I feel teachers yearn to recover.