As a relative newcomer to the field of education, I’ve only just discovered the online forums of the Times Educational Supplement. Forget the TES, which is to the educational establishment what the Church Times is to the Church of England. The forums are the place to go. It’s like being a fly on the wall in the staffroom of a large inner-city comprehensive after the headteacher has departed.
Above stairs, the writers are focused on highfalutin things like policy and research, but below stairs the posters are more concerned with day-to-day matters. I suspect that quite a few of them are English teachers because one of their favourite themes is the misuse of language.
To begin with, there’s the fact that their pupils haven’t mastered their mother tongue. They say ‘less’ when they mean ‘fewer’, ‘of’ when they mean ‘have’, and ‘borrow’ when they mean ‘lend’, as in, ‘Miss, can you borrow me a pen?’ Turns out plenty of teachers still attach some importance to good grammar, even if they aren’t allowed to teach it.
But worse — much worse — is the awful ‘eduspeak’ that infests every school like a biblical plague. Much of this lingo is imported from the business world — there’s plenty of ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘thinking outside the box’. You can’t be head of anything, either, as in ‘head of PE’. Rather, you’re the ‘director of PE’ — and the lower down the pay scale you go, the more grandiose the titles become. Thus, a librarian is now an ‘independent learning centre manager’.
Then there’s the school-specific jargon. When it comes to describing teachers and pupils, the key thing is not to use any words or phrases that hint at a hierarchical relationship.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in