As some of you reading this may know, i have wanted to become a Primary school teacher for nearly 10 years. In fact, it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve ever wanted to with my life.
I’m happy to say that after 2 years of formal applications to get just a toe poking through the door: as a volunteer or T.A. to get some experience in order to then apply to do a GTP (Graduate Teacher Programme), i have FINALLY managed to get a volunteer role with a view to getting a professional position in September.
However, getting to this spot has been a nightmare, i can honestly say i have considered giving up more than once. The system, the help offered (or lack their of!) and the sheer wall of silence i have been met with is more than enough to put anyone off trying for a career in teaching!
Quite odd when you consider that according to all sources there is a drastic shortage of male primary school teachers and that they are desperately needed. Not according to my experience. Every turn and path I tried for was not just blocked, or filled with unhelpful ‘advisors’, no, there seemed to be an agenda that bordered on sabotage and scupper my application.
With this in mind, i have written a rather lengthy and strongly worded corrispondence to one Mr Michael Gove about the current state of the system and both mine and what is now i suppose, my ‘Support Primary School’s’ experiences in dealing with their ‘support centres’ the walls of silence and lack of help we have both had in what we need to do.
Shows you, don’t be afraid to go to the top to get answers and hopefully improvement. I am not confident or even hopeful that I will get a response, but, at least I can now say that i have done my part to stop my experiences happening to someone else. If i do get a response, believe me, it WILL be published here for you all to read :-).
Enjoy a good ol’ rant at the state of the ol’ country of England… once again, it can’t be beaten! 🙂
SENT BY BOTH EMAIL AND FIRST CLASS POST
James Alexander Stevens
Apartment 196, Advent 2
1 Isaac Way
Manchester
M4 7EE
Telephone: 0161 282 6076
Email: jamiealexanderstevens@gmail.com
Rt Hon Michael Gove MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
Telephone: 020 7219 3000
Email: michael.gove.mp@parliament.uk
23rd March 2012
Dear Mr. Michael Gove,
Concerning the current Primary Graduate Teacher Training Programme.
I am writing to you today as a potential Primary GTP (Graduate Teacher Programme) applicant, about not only my own experiences, but also the experiences of a local Primary school that has offered to aid me to become a fully qualified Primary School teacher.
I am a recent university graduate who has been attempting to get onto the teaching ladder directly for 2 years, and working towards applying for just over ten. I have had vast experience working with children of all ages in multiple and varied scenarios, more recently, I have just in the past month, managed to get a foot through the door as a volunteer. However, just getting this position has been a struggle and both myself and my now support school have experienced some frankly appalling and shocking behaviour not only from support providers of GTP courses, but other schools and indeed, local education authorities. I felt that as the Education Minister, it only right that you should hear about these experiences and in doing so I hope, help prevent them from happening to other applicant teachers.
I have been passionate about teaching children since I first started coaching junior cricket when I was thirteen. For the past ten years I have been working with children in various ways, from coaching cricket at both a local and regional level as a volunteer and as a paid regional coach, right through to running and operating kids clubs at various holiday resorts in Greece and Turkey where I taught children to sail and ran varying activities to entertain the younger visitors to the resorts.
More recently, having graduated from university and indeed, in my final year on my course, I have been pursuing a more career oriented path; I have been applying for PGCE Primary courses and GTP Primary positions at primary schools in the Cheshire, Greater Manchester and the High Peak areas. However, in doing so, I have encountered not only problems, but indeed severe short comings in the system and in the way it operates.
I have written to over eighty schools in two separate stages in the course of 12 months; in February 2011 and September of the same year (I have included copies of these letters for you to read yourself). I had expected to get a 20% response rate, I had offered my services in either a voluntary or professional capacity as a teaching assistant to gain experience in a school, with a view to hopefully complete a GTP in a school at a later date. I not only got a less than 20% response rate, I had a grand total of 4 responses. This included the reply of Disley Primary School; the school that I am currently volunteering at.
Many of the responses however, were not just negative, they were also lacking in information. The schools were not willing to take on GTP candidates or even entertain the idea of them due to the fact that they could not garner enough information out of the GTP Support Providers to warrant any further action on looking into the matter.
This is my first major concern that I am hopefully bringing to your attention: This country- according to all sources (yourself included)- is very short and desperate for male Primary School teachers. I am fully committed and passionate about getting into Primary school teaching, I firmly believe I would and could be a fantastic teacher and really give something back to the education system that has, up to now, presented me with some excellent experiences and opportunities. However, having written to schools as a candidate with a good educational and child experience background, to say I have had a less than encouraging response would be a large understatement. So this is my first worry; that schools who are in apparent need of male teachers, seem unwilling to take a chance and even meet with myself (indeed, taking my experience as an example, I have to assume this is the same for many or indeed, the majority of male applicants). Can you explain why this is the case?
I shall now move on to my second fear with the current system. When I did not receive a positive response (or indeed, any response in the majority of cases) I decided to get some advice first hand from the local support provider. In my case it was Storm, but also the University of Derby Buxton for some of the High Peak and Derbyshire Primary schools that I had applied to. It is my regret to inform you that I had very much the same experience that the Primary Schools allegedly had from some of their responses. The providers gave little or no information or advice on how to best go about applying to schools; whether I should phone, ask for a face to face meeting or write letters as I had been doing. They refused to give out names of schools where candidates had had successful responses and failed to give any form of even simple advice. All I received as an answer to my questions and queries was that I had to ‘contact the schools, then send off an application when I had found a school willing to host my training’. I was not told where the application form might be found, I was not told how much it would cost the school or myself for the training, should I be successful but fail to get a ‘funded or partially funded place’, and I was not told how many fully or partly funded places were available for the coming academic year. To top matters off, I was not even told when the application date for said coming academic year would close (at the time I was applying for the September 2011-June 2012 academic year).
Now again, I cannot understand why a so called ‘support centre’ would offer so little help and advice to any potential teacher, let alone a male who is interested in applying for primary school positions. The entire system of ‘support’ is completely none existent. I would be willing to put my experience down as a one off, however, if you will read on, I was dismayed to discover that this is not the case, and the similar experiences of other individuals is what has compelled me to write to you in this capacity.
When I failed to find any answers to my questions with these support centres, I took my matter, and indeed my applications even further and wrote to all the local education authorities in Bolton, Liverpool, Derbyshire and Greater Manchester. I thought that the local authorities might hold slight sway over schools to gain me some voluntary experience, or that they would know if there were any teaching assistant vacancies that I could apply for within these schools. I even wrote, asking if there were jobs going within the education departments themselves, so I could work my way into teaching perhaps from another angle.
Once again, I was met by a wall of silence. Out of the 24 letters I sent out to the local authorities, I received not one single reply.
I find these lack of responses not only disheartening with regards to my own self esteem. I was also severely dismayed that having spent so much time on composing my correspondence, having spent all the money on envelopes, stamps, and printing supplies, that not one person took the time to respond. I was left in the dark. Left wondering whether there was a problem with my CV, with my tone, with my experience. I did not know if I was a suitable candidate or whether I was just wasting my time, or whether I had gone about the whole process in completely the wrong way.
Thankfully, after 2 years of applications, letters, and much frustration, Disley Primary School offered their support with my career. I have been offered -and have taken- a voluntary position for 2 days a week for the rest of the academic year. Sadly, this also leads me to my final 2 reasons for writing to your good self.
Disley’s original intention was to ask me to volunteer and drop an application for a place on the GTP to become a trainee teacher in the upcoming academic year (starting September 2012). The Head Teacher (one Mrs Heather Taylor) attempted to look into the matter herself, as both herself and the school had never taken on a graduate teacher but had always wanted to do so. To my dismay, having phoned the local ‘support provider’ she was met, the same as myself, with a complete lack of guidance, support or advice on not only how to apply, but whether Disley Primary School was suitable, whether it was a wasted venture, how they would be assessed and what they would need to do, if they needed to send off an application themselves in order to train teachers or how much it would cost the school itself.
Now, I can understand perhaps, that the support providers do struggle with a volume of calls from applicants such as myself. But having heard the distinct lack of advice that Mrs Taylor received on behalf of a school wanting to offer itself as a training facility is simply staggering. I would have thought that a school offering to train teachers (and a male teacher at that) would have been jumped upon and helped no end. Sadly not, it appears that this lack of advice from these ‘support centres’ is not just a one off received by myself, it is a universal problem experienced by training providers as well. Disley Primary School had to take time away from a neighbouring school who had had a trainee teacher in, in order to ask them their experiences and how they went about with their application and what was required and requested of them.
So having wasted my own time and that of my now support school, the lack of aid, information and support given by these centres has a massively detrimental knock on effect to their schools already in the system. Once again, I am staggered by this, and really would like to bring to your attention the problems I have experienced along with Disley Primary School in order for change to be implemented, lest it happen again to others.
My final concern is one with part of the terms and conditions that Mrs Taylor and I discovered upon investigating the applications off our own back, if you’ll pardon the expression. We discovered that should my application be rejected, that I am ‘black listed’ from applying again for ‘a minimum of 3 years’.
Now this strikes me as not only vague, but highly detrimental to the system. To begin with ‘a minimum of 3 years’; so should an applicant be unsuccessful, how on earth are they meant to know when they can apply again? There is no maximum time limit stated in any way. Now, not only will this put the majority of applicants off, depriving this country of some outstanding potential teachers. It also delays those who might not have what is classed as ‘the minimum and necessary experience’ but are keen and eager to apply, such as myself had I not looked into the matter further. To deny someone the opportunity to potentially follow their dream career simply because they are desperate to start is not something a country that prides itself as world leader in education does. They should be encouraged, not thrown out. Applicants should be told why they are not successful, allowing them to improve to apply in the future, not simply booted back out of the door with little or no explanation and a minimal chance of applying in the future.
On the whole Mr. Gove I am still thoroughly committed to becoming a Primary School teacher, as I hope many others also are, however the battle to get just to the position I am currently in now (to clarify, I am now not applying until next year for a the September 2013 academic year. Just to make sure I have the maximum experience in a classroom I am working as teaching assistant at Disley Primary school for the entirety of September 2012-June 2013), is not one I know many will choose to continue. It is such a shame, because having advertised a desperate need for male primary school teachers, (and it pains me to say this) the system I have just experienced seems determined to not only put people off applications, but scupper, almost sabotage any man wanting to apply for these positions.
I look forward to hearing your reply. I apologise for writing to you in this capacity and thank you for taking the time to read this letter. I really hope change or improvements can be made for the better. After all, that is that any teacher or yourself would want; an education system that encourages not only great results, but helps train and nurture those potential teachers that want to develop our children, our future for the better.
Yours Sincerely,
James Stevens.
thethoughtsofjamie 