By Tom Utley
Last updated at 8:01 AM on 22nd January 2010
Every sentence, every phrase, almost every word of the latest letter we've had from our 16-year-old's comprehensive school fills me with the deepest gloom.
'Dear Parent/Carer,' it begins, and already my heart begins to sink.
Yes, I understand the use of the singular, since so many of the letter's recipients are indeed single.
And family arrangements being what they are in my part of South London, I dare say that some of my boys' schoolmates are being brought up by their grannies, aunts or people unrelated to them.
Where are all the inspiring teachers these days? Inside writing letters that begin: 'Dear Parent/Carer'...
But there's something about the word 'carer', with its undertone of the social services, that I find profoundly depressing. Why not the more traditional and dignified title 'guardian' - or has that, for some mysterious reason, become politically incorrect?
But I'm letting my fuddy-duddy prejudices run away with me before I've even begun. On, then, with my grim letter, jointly signed by the deputy principal and the director of the sixth form at Dunraven School (oxymoronic motto: 'Excellence for All').
The groans, by the way, are my own additions - but the rest is a faithful transcript:
'In line with recent government guidance [groan] to tackle inequalities [groan] and improve health outcomes for young people [groan], NHS Lambeth and the Children and Young People's Service of the London Borough of Lambeth [groan] are rolling out [groan] a service for sixth-form students [groan].'
From here on, I'll let readers insert their own groans where they think appropriate.
'This is part of a wider area programme led by the local Teenage Pregnancy & Parenthood Partnership to reduce under-18 conceptions...
'In keeping with good practice, Dunraven has an up-to-date Sex and Relationship Education Policy and programme of work. Building on this, it is proposed that a specialist outreach nurse will offer a school-based health drop-in including the provision of confidential sexual health advice available directly to students on a weekly basis . . .'
You get the idea, so I'll spare you the rest. Before I go any further, let me make it absolutely clear that this is not an attack on Dunraven School. Despite all the Government's efforts to make their lives impossible, the teachers there are doing a heroic job for my son, for which I'm extremely grateful.
No, my boy's school is just one of hundreds all over the country which have had to send out very similar letters over the past few days or weeks, couched in the same deadly jargon, raising groans from countless parent/carers who received them.
The tragedy is that they're forced to spend half their lives churning out this bilge by a Government that regards their venerable profession as merely a minor branch of the state bureaucracy - charged not with educating pupils (sorry, 'students') but with 'tackling inequalities' and 'improving health outcomes'.
My letter, and the weekly blizzard of others like it, is just a hideously graphic illustration of what it's increasingly coming to mean to be a teacher in Labour's Britain.
I confess I don't know what attracted Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy to the profession. I don't know, either, which subjects they teach - and I daren't ask my son, because he'll rumble that I'm breaking his strict ban on embarrassing him yet again by mentioning his school.
So I'll let fancy take flight, and imagine the deputy principal as a classicist, enraptured in her youth by Virgil's glorious rhythms and cadences and determined to pass on her enthusiasm to the next generation.
I see Mr Cuffy as a mathematician, marvelling at the beauty of Fermat's last theorem, tortured by the difficulty of proving it and yearning to awaken young minds to the boundless wonder of numbers and the way they behave.
Or perhaps they're both specialists in English literature, who during their own childhoods struck upon Oliver Goldsmith's lines about the village schoolmaster, and resolved on the spot that this would be the life for them: 'And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew/ That one small head could carry all he knew.'
Of course, like so many of their colleagues these days, Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy may indeed have gone into teaching with a view to 'tackling inequalities', in the sense of giving deprived children a leg-up by laying before them the opportunities offered by knowledge.
Thoroughly worthy, too. In my experience, some of the most inspiring teachers (though by no means all of them) lean to the Left.
But it's surely fair to guess that it was no part of teaching's attraction to them that it would mean spending hours every week writing groan-inducing letters to 'Dear Parent/Carer', outlining the latest fatuous social-engineering scheme dreamed up by the wretched Ed Balls or Harriet Harman. (By the way, I've just noticed that Mr Cuffy begins another of his letters this week, about student ID cards and on-site security, with the words: 'Dear Parent/Guardian.' Good for you, Sir!)
Ed Balls's pursuit of 'Excellence for All' means schools are forced to follow a narrow curriculum
I can't help thinking of some of the teachers who inspired me most during my own, privileged childhood: Noel Wilkinson, who sparked my lifelong love of Latin; the extraordinary Theodore Zinn, who could reel off vast tracts of Homer and Horace and ignored the books on the A-level curriculum if there were others he liked better; Jim Cogan ('slide your scripts down the aisle and pin back your lug'oles') who opened my ears to Shakespeare; even dear old Ted Craven, who taught us very little about the subject on the timetable, but an awful lot about his wartime experiences in the Royal Navy. . .
Would they have gone into the profession if it had meant carrying out Mr Balls's edicts about what and how they were allowed to teach? I can only guess. But one thing's for sure: I can't see any of them sitting down willingly to write to parents about schoolbased health drop-ins.
Indeed, I strongly suspect that if Mr Zinn had been asked to do any such thing, he would have resorted to his favourite technique for silencing an over-animated classroom - which was breaking down in tears.
So, yes, David Cameron is right to worry that teaching is becoming less attractive to the best graduates. But if he wants to make it more so, he'll have to do a great deal more than raising the profession's entrance requirements (and never mind that his plan to demand at least a 2:2 degree would disqualify some excellent teachers who came to learning late).
Nor will it be enough to introduce performance-related pay, negotiated by individual heads - even if he manages to persuade the unions to accept it.
What makes the profession increasingly unappealing these days is the constant interference from Whitehall, which makes drudges of all teachers - and not just those like poor Ms Lowe and Mr Cuffy who have to deal with the admin.
In Mr Balls's pursuit of 'Excellence for All' (which means dumbing down exams until it's A-stars all round), they're forced to follow a narrow and often politically motivated curriculum that's more about indoctrination than education.
I'd rather hoped that when our boy embarked on his A-level course, his teachers would be given a little more freedom to pass on their own enthusiasms, rather than the Government's. That was until I asked him what he was studying in English.
He came out with a word that was unfamiliar to me. I've forgotten what it was - and, again, I dare not ask him. But I vividly remember his reply when I asked him what it meant.
'Well, it's basically about racism and sexism,' he said.
Like Mr Zinn, I felt like shedding a manly tear.
Has Mr Cameron the energy and determination it will take to set teachers free?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1245150/The-groan-inducing-letter-sons-school-shows-wrong-teaching-today.html#ixzz0dM7J6YOu
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