It’s a Saturday morning in May, and while most schools are empty, mine is open for year 11 revision classes. Teachers are expected to attend, no questions asked. Students are too, although they have a choice and not all of them do. Similar sessions are held throughout half terms and Easter holidays.
What began as sessions for only the core subjects of maths, English and science quickly extended to every subject where a handful of students were either willing or able to attend. The teachers taking these classes have no choice about whether they want to be involved. Those who refuse face a backlash from the senior leadership team. Some even suspect they’ve been passed over for promotion.I didn’t teach year 11, so escaped the extra revision classes this time around, for which I felt extremely guilty and incredibly grateful. But that hasn’t meant I’ve dodged frequent demands for revision sessions, which now happen before, during and after school for every year group. We can expect to lose both of our half-hour breaks to this, despite also teaching a full day.
Much of this pressure can be traced back to the introduction of performance-related pay and targets. My school wants us to do everything in our power to prevent a student from failing – whether that’s having them back after lessons or after school to improve or redo minor class assessments. This makes sense, to an extent. As teachers, our job is to help students reach their potential. If they fail to do this, we need to make the time to help them so they don’t make the same mistake again. But this just isn’t what happens.
I’ve spent break after break with the same students, going over their work, flagging up exactly the same mistakes they’ve made before. The students listen. They correct their work. They leave. And it all happens again in the next assessment.
I’m aware that this isn’t just a problem at my school. At the 2017 NASUWT conference, the union expressed support for teachers who feel bullied into holding revision sessions outside of school hours. It voiced a deep concern about pressure to carry out such interventions to compensate for lazy students. Members voted for the union to consider instructing teachers not to hold sessions outside of the school day.
This over-reliance on teachers goes beyond exam results. Responsibility is taken from our students in all areas. If a student misses detention, we’re expected to use our free time to collect them and keep them after school. They miss it again? The exact same procedure. Detention is no longer just a punishment for the student; it’s a punishment for us as well. Meanwhile, the senior leadership team won’t escalate matters for continuous reoffenders.We need to do something. Teachers in my school complain about the students acting entitled – demanding our time at any moment of their choosing. But we encourage this with our behaviour. We make their revision materials; we make booklets, cards and posters. When we run extra sessions, we go through every single topic we’ve ever taught – re-teaching, not revising. We expect the students to do nothing, so they don’t.
This doesn’t do our students any favours. If we don’t provide them with a chance to fail, they have no chance to grow. If, for every assessment, they know they can just redo it with no impact on their grade, there’s no urgency. The students who demand revision classes morning, noon and night don’t necessarily work hard in lessons. In fact, the growing attitude is that lessons don’t matter; they’ll relearn it all in revision Clearly, it’s no good for teachers either. The extra time we’re expected to give to students means our workloads, already stretched by a demanding job, become even more strenuous to manage. Our lives away from school are gradually chipped away. But there’s little understanding of our plight from senior leadership. When we do complain, we’re told “teaching is difficult” and left to deal with it.
We need to let pupils fail occasionally, without playing the blame game with their teacher. Make them take some responsibility for the standard of their learning. Give them a chance to improve their work on their own. It might be slow going, but could also mean they don’t need spoon-fed revision classes every Saturday to pass the exams. Because surely, as educators, we should be making sure students not only know how to give a right answer – but that they truly understand the subject, too
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