I’m worried about what Labour might do to our schools

In my first lesson teaching Year 8 in inner-city Birmingham, one boy, seeing the opening slide of my ‘Introduction to Judaism’ PowerPoint, rocked back on his chair, and, with a level of focus that he never matched again, simply said, ‘I f***ing hate the Jews.’ The Teach First training programme had promised us ‘challenging’ schools. And that was exactly what we got.

Behaviour was bad, but so was the curriculum. There was little or no teaching resources, which meant that each night we had to hurriedly reinvent the wheel. Surely, I thought, someone must have created a worksheet on Genesis 1 before?

The other oddity was how we were encouraged to teach. The favoured pedagogical style was what is called ‘minimally guided instruction’ – a pedagogical theory with roots in Romanticism which, while highly seductive, has the downside of not being very good.

We were told to involve the pupils – sorry, ‘learners’ – in as many varied activities as possible.