PeriodOne

www.ratemyteachers.co.uk should strike fear into the heart of any educational professional. I’m on there already from one of my PGCE placements (with a modest 3.8 out of 5 for your information). As the Telegraph has already noted, the concept of a website through which pupils and parents can anonymously critique teachers is problematic, to say the least. What worries me most is that kids are not educational professionals. That the site offers a no-holds-barred, brutal and honest means of school or teacher appraisal in contrast to Ofsted’s staid and linguistically torturous reports is certainly an appealing notion. But, sadly, it’s all wrong. Kids can’t accurately assess teachers any more than the average person could rate a barrister or doctor. And yes, of course a teacher would say that. Yes, of course ‘if anyone should know, it will be the kids’. Well, no, of course not. We all think back to our school days from an adult perspective, superimposing our contemporary acuity of insight onto our teenage selves. Alright, but this site isn’t governed by the opinions of retrospectively insightful former pupils. It quantifies the opinions of children, quite possibly egged on by peers, and wholly unaware of the potential consequences of their actions. Michael Hussey, the site’s young co-creator (and one time supply teacher), may have hit on a GoogleAds goldmine of a idea, but his claims that RMT represents a reflective aid for teachers’ professional development is bordering on the delusional.

Nine weeks allows some perspective, albeit distorted with inexperience and exhaustion. It means about 170 lessons, maybe 60 free periods, probably over 1000 emails and innumerable cups of tea, stern looks, raised voices and moments of quiet desperation. Of course, that stock-take barely does justice to the experience of teaching a couple of months in a comprehensive school in south central London, but one gets the gist. And, interestingly, it turns out that the kids ARE alright. Or at least, most of them are alright most of the time. Not sure about the teachers though. The years that most of us spent IN classrooms but OUTSIDE staffrooms lent the latter a certain mystique; glimpses through the door revealed teachers chatting in a suspiciously, well, casual fashion. Almost as if they had something to talk about. Some even laughed. And even as a newly qualified teacher there’s a hard-to-locate feeling – just the tiniest perceptible shudder – as one passes through the door into what was for so long the unknown. And it becomes clear that, yes, the teachers DO have something to talk about. But after this realisation it is hard to overcome a sense of bathos when it turns out that all they talk about is the kids anyway. Now, that would have really amazed us back then. In fact, I often think – what conversations were had concerning me? Did MY teachers speculate with such inappropriate alacrity about the state my pubescent, fumbling love life? Was the news that I had crashed and burned trying to ask out whoever from 8E greeted with the same hilarity as was a recent announcement in our staffroom concerning the similarly unsuccessful exploits of our very own year 8 proto-Casanova? It doesn’t bear thinking about.