Den övervakade skolan – verkligheten bakom serien

Den brittiske läraren, författaren, bloggaren och twittraren Tom Bennett har, som han själv beskriver det, befunnit sig på bergstoppen, besökt själva moderskeppet och han delar med sig av upplevelsen i sin blogg:

Ladies and gentlemen, I have BEEN to the mountain top. This week I visited the mother-ship of telly schools: Passmores, in Harlow. It was, of course, the event horizon of the Channel 4 edu-phenomenon black hole Educating Essex, which gave me far too much to write about a few months back, as the fixed rig docudrama attempted to peel back the curtain of schooling and let the public see what kind of wizards were pulling the levers. It was the hit you couldn’t miss if you were a teacher. I wanted, perhaps for the first time,  to draw a teacher-eye picture of what our favourite telly-comp was like from the inside, as opposed to a journalist’s preferred storyline.

Skolan han besöker är inte den slitna byggnad vi ser i serien, utan ” a groovy new edu-plex” vi kommer att få se längre fram. Han tas emot och visas runt i byggnaden av ”Vic Goddard, the towering, towering Godfather of Passmores” (8 feet tall). Bennett ger uttryck för sin skepsism gentemot beskrivningar som ‘inspirerande’, det handlar, säger han, ju oftast om personkulter byggda kring män eller kvinnor som sällan eller aldrig kan leva upp till förväntningarna hos de skaror av människor de surfar på. Men med Goddard förhåller det sig annorlunda:

He really is the genuine article; I have no idea what he was like as a PE teacher (other than, as all PE teachers, villains), but he conveys the sense of being an excellent leader- totally focussed on what he wants to do, totally committed to the well-being of the children, totally driven to make it happen. Best of all, he doesn’t possess what I often perceive in the committed: intolerance […] He took me on a tour of the school. Not an Ofsted serving suggestion, but just a general walk around ‘the arms of the starfish’ (which is also the name of a stag club in Soho, incidentally), past room after room of glass-walled classes full of children all working away, drawing, writing, turning the Tempest into a rap, the usual. Not one of them looked unruly or desperate; not one of them erupted into faux-outrage when we entered. There was even a cover lesson where the kids were working quietly (I KNOW!) in pairs, happy to answer questions. This wasn’t something you could fraud for the cameras, and there certainly wasn’t any ‘days-out’ jiggery-pokery with the naughty kids; this was a school where manners, respect and discipline were part of the atmosphere, and I have to admit, it was a beautiful thing.

Det är, som Bennett framhåller, lätt att låta sig imponeras av en ny, futuristisk, fantastisk byggnad (de har t ex koldioxidmätare i rummet som piper när det är dags att öppna fönstren och släppa in mer syre i rummet) men bara yta räcker inte långt. Han frågar därför Goddard om hur man faktiskt bär sig åt för att skapa denna atmosfär. Svarsformuleringen låter välrepeterad men uppriktig:

consistency, a shared vision throughout the school communicated clearly to everyone, and reinforced by senior staff.

Ihärdighet, en gemensam, genomgående vision som tydliggörs för alla och underbyggs av de som arbetar i skolan.

Så enkelt, så innerligt svårt på samma gång.

Now I know from a variety of dodgy management positions that this is one of the hardest parts: first of all you have to have a vision, otherwise you deal with life as it comes, and endless other factors buffet you as they will; but next you have to acknowledge that you cannot do everything yourself; your job is to drive people in the direction you want, and let them to drive their people the same way, preferably with their buy-in, sometimes without it. The school chariot travels nowhere, and slowly, unless the horses all pull the same way.

En del av denna atmosfär är det genomarbetade och konsekvent genomförda disciplinsystemet som är i bruk på skolan. Kvarsittning, avstängning, tillsägelser – vi har sett det, somliga har förfärats, andra nickat instämmande. Bennett, britt som han är, ser disciplineringen som en betydelsefull del av skolans ansvar i samhället:

It really was a joy to behold. Not because I enjoy seeing children assigned to the gaol, but because of the certainty of it, the difficulty for any child to elude it. Of course, they could just bolt, like any other sanction, but a member of staff is paid to analyse each day’s detention attendance, and track/ pursue any fugitives. Simple; effective. What the anti-sanction brigade often forget is that the purpose of sanctions is to render themselves obsolete; that providing a deterrent to student misbehaviour is designed to make sure they don’t incur sanctions in the future. And a deterrent is only a deterrent when it is believed to be inevitable, which in a school it can be, unlike, say, society, where justice and the jailer are easily given the slip.

Vid sitt besök på Passmores Academy möter Bennett också Mr Drew, den biträdande rektorn som vi sett både sjunga glatt och upprätthålla disciplinen på skolan, beslagta luvtröjor och mobiltelefoner och övervaka kvarsittare:

S-Drew is equally impressive; an intelligent, friendly man whom, I imagine, is the same man in the corridor as he is beyond it. It’s something that he seemed to share with Vic: an impression conveyed of being in exactly the right place at the right time, doing something you love, with dedication and care. Aristotle declared that the point of human life was eudaimonia– a kind of flourishing, matching one’s potential to your challenges and developing thereby. I sense at least two men in a state of incrementaleudaimonia here. And when the individual flourishes in his or her role, the community flourishes. And when the community flourishes, the individual flourishes, in a perfect integration of both  socialist and liberal visions. I would not, I hasten to point out, like to get on the wrong side of Mr Drew. There’s a sense that he would crawl over broken glass to support your education but also that he possessed an ENDLESS OCEAN OF STUBBORNNESS THAT MEANT HE WOULD NEVER GIVE UP TELLING YOU TO DO YOUR TIE PROPERLY UNLESS THE SUN WENT SUPERNOVA. Perhaps not even then. Good man.

Bennett är, som jag skrev inledningsvis, lärare. Han har bloggat ingående om den tv-serie vi nu har möjlighet att följa på svensk TV, och han beskriver sina intryck av skolan utifrån sitt lärarperspektiv. Läs hela inlägget här, och fundera t ex över hans beskrivningar av toaletterna på skolan, av samhället Harlow och av lektionerna.

Själv funderar jag fortfarande över varför det är så tyst kring serien här? Lärartidningar, varför skriver ni inget? Kvällstidningar? DN? Har ni helt missat den, eller upplever ni den som irrelevant för svensk skola? Finns det inget vi kan lära oss av serien? Är det en alltför främmande värld för att vi skall låta oss inspireras? Jag vet inte, men undrar gör jag.