LIKE JFK's assassination, every-one can remember when they first saw Susan Boyle. If my memory serves me correctly, I was sitting in front of my TV set watching Britain's Got Talent when she strode purposefully on to the stage, looking like an old maid who had lost the rest of her coach party on a trip to the Braehead shopping centre.
I thought she would embarrass the nation, but, as they say, it's not over until the fat lady sings and, boy, did this chubby chanteuse prove the cynics wrong. Apparently, her clip on YouTube has taken more hits than your average ginger-haired G20 dem
onstrator.
Let's be honest: her success is because the public had such low expectations after she fluffed her lines and wiggled her middle-aged body with all the allure of a rheumatism-riddled belly dancer.
Low expectations may also be part of the explanation behind the findings of a recent study by the market research company Caci that challenges the view poverty is the key influence in low levels of pupil attainment. Taking various socioeconomic factors into account – eg, health and parents' employment status – they discovered ten local authorities were under-performing. Liz Smith, MSP, the Conservative spokeswoman on education, said councils could no longer blame social factors for low standards. An inconvenient truth, however, is that the same study put prosperous East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire in first and second place respectively in this education beauty contest.
Undaunted by pesky things such as facts, Ms Smith points out schools who achieve good exam results "are about good leadership and good teachers". By her reasoning, so-called sink schools exist only because of bad leadership and incompetent teachers. Does she really believe the complicated reasons for the attainment problems of our poorest schools can be solved by something as simple as a staff makeover?
I thank God, Buddha, Muhammad and the Rev Sun Myung Moon that I no longer teach in a failing school. Staff appointed to such education gulags start off with high expectations, but, over a short period of time, the daily routine of confrontations with youngsters who arrive late to class with no bag, no books and not even a pencil, causes much consternation. In these establishments, managements seem unable (unwilling?) to impose effective sanctions and, instead, trust that the lure of a trip to Alton Towers will ameliorate the behaviour of those teenagers exhibiting the greatest sociopathic tendencies.
Unfortunately, as any psychologist will tell you, behaviour that gets rewarded, gets repeated, and it becomes the task of the isolated teacher to come up with classroom survival strategies. Pointedly ignoring pupils who kick each other under the tables is a good technique; after all, the worst that can happen is the horseplay escalates into a full-scale boxing match, with the desirable result that both pupils are excluded for a few days.
In poorly performing schools, the problem of low expectations is not the monopoly of teachers. Kids often hand in work that does not reflect their ability because of intimidation by an invidious peer pressure that dictates it is cool to be a fool. In schools serving deprived communities, alienated, inarticulate parents often have low expectations of their kids, something that helps explain the derisory turnout at parents' evenings.
Until politicians address our society's social and economic inequalities, I don't expect much will change.
