Bullying Bosses

  Mr Gove wants to get rid of badly performing teaches quickly. But all he is doing is creating plans that will enable heads to get rid of teachers they don't like. He might himself believe that all badly performing classes are caused by bad teachers but he has, as usual, produced no evidence to support his claim.

  In many cases it is the head who is the cause of the problem, it is often when there is a new head who reorganises the school to fit with their prejudices that undermines teachers and their favourites get special treatment and suddenly quite successful teachers find themselves struggling.

  The general problem of bosses who surround themselves with yes-people and make life difficult for the others is one of the biggest causes of bad performance in any environment. Of course there are "very bad" teachers as there are "very good"  teachers but the numbers in both cases are small.  Also not many bad teachers survive for that long, it is a very depressing job if you are not good at it.

 A more complex problem is that some teachers are good for some children and bad for others. Recently I came across the situation of a teacher not performing particularly well but then changed the year group he was teaching and  found his feet.

   Enabling one individual to have that much power is always dangerous, it is always easy to see that with Mr Gove. Why the Liberals agreed to the latest education act which they rushed through parliament is a mystery to me and possibly even to them.