Better teachers

Everyone knows that in the inner city, in order to have an outstanding school, one needs a bunch of outstanding teachers. Fill a school with ordinary teachers and you'll never sing to Ofsted's tune. Neither will you get excellent results, because only the extraordinary teacher can get inner city kids to dance to something other than Hip Hop and R&B.

And there we have the problem. Extraordinary teachers are rare, by definition. Most of them are satisfactory and a handful are good. Most teachers want to finish work by 5 or 6pm. After all, they began their days at 7:30 or 8 am. Most teachers don't want to work more than 4 or 5 hours at the weekend. Even by these standards, we're looking at 50 or 55 hours a week. And that isn't 50 hours of sitting at a computer. For some, that's about 30 hours of battling it out in Vietnam and another 20 or so doing something less stressful like planning or marking.

So what do the extraordinary teachers do? Well, for one, they tend to think the ones who work 50 or 55 hours per week are lazy. They of course are somewhere nearer the 60 or 70 hour mark. And then, in spite of the exhaustion that can be induced in Vietnam, they dance about their classrooms, jumping on every child's wandering eye, seizing every opportunity for inspiration and dazzling children by making their subject 'fun'.

Those of us who wish our schools to be outstanding watch these gems at work and wish longingly that all of our teachers could be like this. If only we could make them all extraordinary. If only we could shoot the rest of them. But that's just the problem. Extraordinary, by definition, means exceptional.

But we're all so brainwashed into believing that if children are more interested in Hip Hop than they are in history, then it must be the fault of the teacher. His lessons aren't sparkly enough. His planning isn't thorough enough. His whole being is simply satisfactory and he should never have become a teacher. What those of us in the state sector never seem to grasp is that no other country in the world is so 'advanced' when it comes to top teaching. Nor do we realise that in the private sector ordinary teaching is not only the norm but extraordinary teachers are very rare indeed.

What makes the schools in Nigeria successful is not their teachers, but their children. What makes the schools in the private sector successful is not their teachers, but their children. And what makes China arguably the most powerful nation in the world and certainly set to be so in the future, is not their teachers, but their children.

China doesn't make demands of her teachers as Britain does. China respects her teachers. Whether extraordinary or ordinary, they are all treated with respect. China requires obedience from her children and never apologises for her teachers. Compete with Hip Hop and R&B and make one's subject fun? The Chinese would laugh at such an idea. Blame the teacher for the child's lack of interest? In most of the world, that notion would simply be absurd.

But back in Britain, we lay the blame at the teacher's door. We spend our time wishing we could have better teachers. We spend all our cash and our energies training better teachers. And we miss the obvious fact which has been sitting in front of us all along. If we want to be successful, all we need to do is to make our kids into better kids.