On 12 Mar 2005 at 22:11, David Bowles wrote:
Big mistake.
...well actually I'm still reserving judgement on this. But I can't hold off for much longer, as seven years later I still haven't found an appropriate niche for myself within this field -- at least not one that's open to people who come in from outside the teaching profession.
Yes I've done a small amount of consulting with some DfES backed initiatives. However it seems schools operate as a strictly 'closed shop' at any level above 'technician'. As far as management work is concerned this is strictly closed to anyone who's not already a 'qualified teacher' with years clocked up at the chalk-face.
I work for a 6th form college, actually the place I did my A-levels at. I'm 24 now, have spend 4 years working here (doesn't seem that long to me), after having spend a year and a half in industry, in a slightly more responsible role than the one I hold currently. Coming in to education I was struck by a slight sense of 'two staff', them and us: "I'm a technician. I've got no degree to my name. Thus I am not as good as them", however that attitude was more from the old guard of the staff, and probably wasn't helped by my comparible youth. Most are fully accepting and treat me as a human being. Having served on the "Conditions of Service" forum, I got the impression this two staff attitude was one they've been steadily eroding for a long time now with fair success. Talking with colleagues in other schools / colleges, I get the impression that its still a far flung issue. Recent events here make me think it occurs at another level entirely, "three staffs", with cleaners forming the lowest rank (several teachers walked past a cleaner struggling to get a waxing machine through a doorway, before I got there to hold the doors open for her.)
But I'm running out of options and soon I'll have no choice but to admit opportunities for outsiders wanting to work in schools above poorly paid 'technician' or 'Teaching Assistant' grades are virtually non-existent ...not unless you can afford to do this for free as a School Governor. I'd hate have to admit that all along I've been backing the wrong horse in a fixed race!
I'm not convinced there is much space at all in education for anything other than poorly paid technicians. We are all that seem to exist. Education relies on a couple of types of characters for IT support: Enthusiasts and poor-quality-workers (some overlap between the two). Most of the good ones fit in the former category. We know the pay is appaling on an industry scale but we continue to work in education, not for the money, but out of enthusiams, striving to do our best with the limited resources we get. Taking time to learn the skills necessary to support a wide variety of aspects. I'd argue that there are few IT staff more multi-skilled than those that work in education. The others are the ones that can't seem to get a job at a higher wage and are doing the work because its a job, more than anything else. The one-click wonders, who can setup a network purely because there are wizards that you can follow. When things go wrong... well less said the better. Likewise I've heard so many disaster stories relating to networks in education its a wonder users don't end up with an extreme fear of networks.
Not that I'd mind so much if school management systems were on the whole well designed and appropriate to the needs of the students and staff they are meant to serve. Alas I've discovered this is all too often not the case. From a management perspective too many schools seem to operate in a time-warp, one that's about 30 years behind the times compared with the world of commerce where to date I've spent most of my working life.
Where is education expected to get these skills from? Headmasters and principles are traditionally former teaching staff. As are their deputies as well, for that matter. Its a nice thing in some regards, after all most teachers got into education with some desire to teach, and the attitude that goes with it. However, these days with such tight budgets and the like, whats really needed are business men at the top level to drag education kicking and screaming into the real world. I'd still strongly argue that the deputies should be former teachers though. I don't want education to be turned into a business and risk it losing the 'public sector feel', after all the kids are what is most important. However a certain element of ruthlessness and strong business practices are sorely needed. We had a consultation session amongst staff about 6 months after I started. I made several observations based on what I'd learnt in the mere year and a half I'd spent in commerce, and the comments came as a large shock to some of the members of staff, given I was thinking about stuff in a completely different way to them. I've no doubt, now, that I'm totally out of touch with the commerce way of doing things, and am probably stuck in that self same education outlook I got frustrated with when I started. Our current principle is much more like a business man in attitude. He came in 3 1/2 year ago, completely tore down the existing staffing structure and rebuilt it from scratch (with just one redundancy), and changed fundamental attitudes. The result is a leaner, far more efficient running staff with a shorter top-to-bottom span. The systems he put in place to control spending and budgets have resulted in us moving from a dangerous financial health category (about a year of bankrupcy) into a strong financial health category.
Here's an IT related example: Within both schools where I did my teaching practice it took more than ten days for someone to set me up with an account on the school network. This required lots of shuffling bits of paper in and out of various pigeonholes in the staff-room.
*shudder* that doesn't surprise me though. Here, when a staff member starts they get a starter pack. In that pack is a copy of the AUP with instructions to leave it in the Network Managers pigeon hole. Accounts are usually added the same day the AUP is handed in, at worst within a day or two.
Not that this account was much use to me in one school, as their network promptly went down ...for a whole month! ...I kid you not!!! Worse still, this took down every PC within the school as well. Plus this school also suffered massive data-loss, including much of their assessed GCSE and GNVQ student course-work -- here I'm talking about a large secondary school with around 1,500 students.
This is the kind of thing I detest. Nothing should make a network go down this badly, unless the staff aren't capable of making proper diagnosis of ailments, or aren't capable of implementing solutions. In a worse case scenario we could rebuild all our servers in a week, recover just the documents off backup, and probably have everything back up and running by the middle of the next week, and that's assuming network issues were so serious as to be irreprable without a clean install.
All my offers of assistance were turned down. Why? Because I didn't have "the appropriate qualifications"(?) to work on their system whatever these might be. They simply weren't interested, not unless I could produce a piece of paper that proved I'd been on "the right networking course". As for all the years I'd spent running my own successful network installation business? Well this counted for absolutely nothing as in their eyes as to them I was just 'a rookie trainee teacher'.
Pieces of paper are far too important these days. I've got 5 1/2 years working experience, supporting Unix, Linux, Novell and MS networks. Can I get even get to interview stage? Can I heck. I've taken advice from numerous agencies, and whilst my work history and experience is impressive, the comments they get back from applications is that I lack the necessary qualifications. (hence I'm doing my CCNA and LPI qualifications at the moment.) God forbid that experience should actually count for something, that it might actually mean more than bits of paper. Sure, someone can tick the right boxes on an exam sheet but having theoretical operating knowledge of a system means nothing compared to knowing what it does in the real world, or how to translate that knowledge into something practical. In a lot of cases I see jobs advertised where they're asking for degree qualified staff to do tasks that I could do in my sleep, without even having a degree, and could easily have managed on exiting college with just my A-levels. (and indeed, as I proved with my first job. I was there as a temp, got employed full-time even though I had none of the 'degree and then some' qualifications they wanted) Trying to persuade people in the education environment is just as hard as far as I've found as it is to persuade those in external business.
So what's the point of this post? Well as I said earlier I'm not a quitter and I've still not lost all hope of finding my niche in 'Teacheland' or at least within some organisation that works closely with schools.
So once again can you help me? ...or failing this can you point me in the direction of a man or woman who can?
I'm not entirely certain what kind of role you're looking to adopt, to be honest. To get 'in' to education environement just seems to need some steady plugging away at things. Working in IT support puts me in a suituation where I'm in regular contact with the teachers, and that seems to have aided my integration into the faculty, but beyond that I couldn't say. I do know we'd probably take offence in this department if other 'non-network' staff started trying to poke their noses in, regardless of qualifications, but then its a matter of inter-department pride that we have a good, fully functioning, virtually never down network (last years teaching time downtime comes out at something like 3 hours.) There are government approved firms out there that make a nice bit of money out of consultation work in the eductaion / public sector. If you've got skills in that regard you may well feel that serves both your desires. However, again, you're likely to hit the barrier relating to having a few letters you can stick behind your name.
David Bowles
PPS: By '...a sloooooow RM based system', I mean really slow. Like the other morning it took me 14 minutes to get from pushing the power button of a PC in the ICT suite, through logging in and navigating to a small text file on the curriculum server, to loading and displaying this in Windows 'Notepad'. To date my record to get from 'power on' to a usable Windows 'Start Menu' is 35 minutes!!! :-( ...hence my strong interest in 'log in' times.
Wow.. even when we had user profiles switched on it never took that long. Now we've got them turned off I can literally go from power on to desktop in under a minute and a half on this workstation, and this box loads apache/php/mysql/ftp servers on it (for intranet development) ----- Paul Graydon Network Technician Haywards Heath College http://www.hhc.ac.uk (01444) 456281 "Joy is not in things; it is in us." Richard Wagner