'Harassment, bullying and abuse of teachers... but not by students'

You’ve got a headteacher and then you’ve got a team of deputes, which is usually less than half a dozen. There are also leaders across departments, so each department’s got a leader. 

In many schools – not in all Scottish schools, but in many – they’ve got a faculty structure now as well. That’s an additional layer. In English, for example, it would be a language faculty, so you would have an English leader, a Modern Language leader and a faculty leader. 

You’ve got a few different layers of leaders, but mainly deputes and subject heads.

Before the pandemic, partly due to the promotion opportunities offered up by Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Attainment Challenge, particularly to staff in schools in less wealthy areas, I took on two leadership roles – one leading, for example, the development of literacy across the school.

And there was a certain status quo, in my view, then: leaders, or promoted staff, breathed a collective sigh of relief at no longer having to contend, first-hand, with the conveyor belt of class after class after class, like classroom teachers do daily.

Promoted staff are given far less (in some cases no) timetabled classes to teach. So they manage their own time and don’t have to contend first-hand with the issues pupils present, academically and socially every school day. Leaders generally had an easier time of it because of far less pupil contact day to day.

Then schools closed. Covid happened.

It was as if school leaders suddenly had to roll up their sleeves again and get involved close-up and personal with Scotland’s young people again. It was suddenly roles reversed and they were at the coal face. Many leaders didn’t like that. I know many struggled to monitor what classroom teachers were doing during lockdown, plus they suddenly had more to do, more graft day-to-day, and that bothered at least some.

I think that generated an unspoken resentment towards their underlings – their own staff. And I think that silent simmering resentment remains. And I will be bold and say I think it accounts for at least some of what we see commonly and inaccurately, unfairly labelled in the media right now as ‘pupil bad behaviour’.

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I once heard Sir John Jones – a very wise educator knighted by the Queen for his services to education UK-wide – talk to school staff and remind us that, in school, the most important factor always influencing pupil behaviour is ‘Our Behaviour’. What can we expect of young people when the example they have is increasing levels across many, many schools of harassment, bullying and abuse of teachers – by leaders? That’s the example being set. Ask any teaching union. They’ll say the same.

In many places, this unspoken resentment has resulted in a very unfortunate (and increasingly common) culture in schools: a top-down, dictatorial style of leadership – one that totally undermines the regulator (General Teaching Council for Scotland)’s minimum standards for the being part of the profession, even as a student teacher, never mind totally obliterating the higher standards set for and expected of those leading the profession.

On the classroom teacher’s side, there was a certain sense of satisfaction during lockdown that leaders were having to earn their very handsome salaries – for a change – while those of us often abandoned by our colleagues at the coal face were allowed a bit of a breather, relatively speaking…

I’ve definitely seen evidence of that conflict between staff and school management teams, both personally and anecdotally from several teaching friends.

I know of classroom teachers being told by leaders that their competence is threatening to the leader; I know of staff who’ve been sexually objectified by leaders, in front of children, who have then been later promoted, while the staff member (the ‘victim’), when they complain, is shunted on by the council to another school within the authority; and I know of schools who have been brought to the exam board’s attention, this past session, for disadvantaging their own pupils (and, in doing so, disadvantaging their staff too).

The sheer prevalence of bad behaviour among leaders is horrifying, disheartening, demoralising and is making me look towards other career options, for sure. Yet I love teaching; I love my job and pupils as well as colleagues across several schools and several local authorities, over almost a decade now, consistently tell me I’m very good at it. But it’s really challenging.

NEXT WEEK: The Secret Teacher continues to look at the issue of leadership in schools, this time focusing on a specific disagreement with a leader who ‘refused to engage in any kind of intellectual debate whatsoever’.

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