In a politically correct society, teaching professionals are constantly reminded about the poor practice of labelling the children in their care.  This worldly advice, emanating from who knows where, tells us time after time that we must separate the child from their behaviour.  For example, we must laugh light-heartedly in the staffroom about “Amy, who likes to set fire to things”, rather than worry unrelentingly about “Amy, the arsonist”.

I’m happy to go along with this linguistic trickery for an easier life in the education fast lane, even though the part of me that displays cynical behaviour thinks it’s largely ineffective.  If we’re so worried about the child being negatively affected, then we really shouldn’t say anything at all!  I do believe that by labelling a child, you could possibly pre-destine them to a life of more of the same behaviour, but you could just as likely give them a much needed wake up call.  Whatever the outcome, the labelling process deserves to be fair.

However, if it’s not ok to label the children in our classrooms for fear of the repercussions, why is it professionally acceptable to label a child’s teacher as ‘inadequate’ when the going gets tough in the school?

A friend of mine, who has been teaching both happily and unhappily for peaks and troughs over the last decade depending on the constitution of the Senior Leadership Team, has recently been given the label of inadequate following on from a lesson observation.  To be fair to Ofsted, they would argue that such a judgement would only be made over time, which of course there is a great deal of sense to.  However, SLTs in their process of conducting their own observations (usually in the anticipation or wake of an Ofsted visit), are often too quick to hand out this grading to their staff based on much shorter periods – sometimes, from within the length of the observation itself.

This is not to say that teachers who are not doing a good job should walk away without address and intervention, but if they are really to be judged over time, I would argue that such intervention needs to be done in a much more timely and effective manner, to ensure that a stage of being deemed inadequate is never even reached – for the benefit of the professional and the school in which they teach, as well as for the children in their care.

In choosing the word inadequate to represent one of their four bands of grading, Ofsted claim that they are not labelling the teacher, but instead highlighting the teacher’s ability to serve a professional educational purpose.  Teachers are human beings, though, and so they understandably take this word and this judgement personally.  You can separate it and re-phrase it however you like, but that word is one hell of a label.

The friend I refer to is sadly not on her own in having to take this arguably disrespectful reference on board, and she won’t be the last.  Even more upsetting, is the fact that she has half a dozen ‘outstandings’ under her educational belt from the duration of her career, and could go on to get another tomorrow, but the damage that this word has done is now forever undoable.

‘Inadequate’ is more than just upsetting; it’s degrading. The only highlight of the word is that it’s marginally more palatable than its synonym counterparts, which if you were to punish yourself by listing through them in a thesaurus, you’d likely want to give up on life, let alone teaching.

In modern day education, if a child is failing in class, the child is the last person to get the blame. All sense of responsibility is removed from the child and even the from the parents.  Instead, all culpability is shoved onto the teacher, who is deemed as having inadequately challenged, supported, guided, planned for and assessed the children they work countless hours for both in and out of school.  So, my question in relation to fair process is this: If the teacher has allegedly fallen so far within their profession, isn’t it a little hypocritical to place the blame entirely on them in the first place?

Yes, SLTs will take their so-called failing teachers to one side and give them the training, the targets and the tracking that will ultimately make them a more Ofsted-agreeable teaching professional at any cost, but once the label of inadequate has been slapped on any human being, it becomes less about raising standards and improving lives, and more about raising teacher drop-out rates and devaluing professional existence.