Can teach Design Technology but Won’t.

I have been a Design Technology teacher since 1993, working on short term contracts in 14 secondary schools. Between contracts I worked on supply in 30+ schools.

These contracts lasted from half a term to 18 months and covering Inner London to South Bucks. The type of schools ranged from the frightening to I don’t want to leave.
I have now gone back to supply teaching for various reasons.

1. It’s become too dangerous to teach Design Technology. Discipline has broken down to such an extent that pupils will not follow basic safety rules in the workshop and my line managers will not do anything about it.
2. I cannot trust the Head or my line managers to back me up if anything should happen. I was assaulted 4 times in one school and nobody was punished. Shoulder charged in the stomach when walking downstairs, hit on the back of the head by a football, hit just below the eye by a thrown object and slammed against a wall. On the last time I legally could have walked out but my colleague’s wife was very seriously ill and I had not wish to dump on him.
3. Only 25% of those pupils taking Design Technology GCSE’s actually want to do it. 25% did not want to do it in the first place, 25% are not doing the subject they chose due to timetabling/staffing problems and 25% do not have the academic ability to get a grade. So 75% of the pupils are against you at every step. It’s not worth the continual daily agro, verbal abuse, total lack of respect and potential physical damage to machines and pupils all of which I will be held legally responsible for.
4. The National Curriculum is joke. If I plan a course of work for a class, I expect to use it for only two years until the government change the goal posts. Why bother? I’ve had enough.
5. When the National Curriculum first came out you had to grade all work under 4 separate headings. Insane. The Establishment then changed it so you graded for pupils Design ability and Skills ability separately. They just could not leave things alone. They changed the rules yet again. Now you grade only once. Good you might think. Wrong. Now the only pupils to get a high grade are those good in both Design and Making. So any pupil with low academic ability but with good making skills will always get a poor grade. Great for discipline. Obvious – yes. Not to our cleaver academic Establishment.
6. Our great leaders have not finished, they have now got another great idea. Vocational Courses. Who is going to write them, certainly not the teachers, they don’t have the time. Who’s going to teach it, the younger teachers may not have the necessary manual skills. But they are not going to replace the totally academic GCSE’s (making is only 10% of the total coursework time). It’s obvious what’s going to happen. Have’s and the Have’nots.

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