Why jobs about people have too much paperwork now!

I work in a pupil referral unit (PRU): a school for children who have been excluded from mainstream education. Nearly all of the children who attend have quite extreme emotional and behavioural difficulties. The children are fragile, violent and full of fear. As staff we have to be endlessly caring, positive and make these children feel contained and loved. We have to uphold firm, fair, boundaries despite them often being a trigger for extreme behaviours as ‘kicking off’ usually gets them out of things they don't want to do in other places in their lives. We can never ‘lose our cool’ as that will undo any trust we might have built up and chances are we will be proving to the children what they hold as a deep-rooted belief about most adults: they cannot be trusted. We have to have a minute by minute awareness of what is going on in the room as the mood can change in seconds and a chair can suddenly be hurled through the air if we don’t get in quickly to prevent it. We cannot have sensitivities when the children call us foul names or target us with the hurt, hate or anger they are so sadly riddled with. We are hit, kicked, bitten and spat at. It is an emotionally draining job (and sometimes physically demanding – we regularly have to restrain children to keep them safe) and the rewards take months to see: the child who eventually gives you a smile instead of a scowl first thing in the morning or the child who, in time, does not turn a chair over automatically because you have presented him with some work. It’s not an easy job but I have grown to find satisfaction in the part of the job I describe in this paragraph. I am quite good at it now.

On top of this intense emotional management of the children (and ourselves!), we have to teach them. We have to ensure that these children who have had such bad experiences with learning and have developed incredible work avoidance strategies, make progress as we tick their rungs up a multi-segmented and extensive assessment tool. (I tick away but in reality a child one day might seem like they have mastered something but the next day it’s as if they had never done it – such is their anxiety and the wiring in their brains. Nobody wants to hear this reality though.) We have to create long, medium and short term plans for these lessons of course. We have to give the children learning objectives and nine-way differentiated success criteria each lesson. We have to find, or mostly, create the differentiated resources to help them achieve these criteria. We have to assess how much the child learned and feed this back to them – verbally, in written form and on our assessment tool. We have to give them 'next steps' after each lesson - they are written. We have to ‘mark’ each child’s behaviour ten times a day. We have to write weekly (sometimes daily if something significant happens) reports about learning (against each subject) and behaviour on a 'tracker' for each child. We have to give them learning targets every half term in several areas of the curriculum and write comments against these targets – the interventions we will apply to support each child to achieve each target and if they are not working, devise new ones. We have to input data about each child’s learning progress and behaviour weekly and in a different place, at the end of each half term. We have to complete paperwork for other organisations when they ask for it - of course. Our children are often involved with other agencies, so we often write professional reports - and usually in the format provided by the organisation that requested it. We have to complete their individual education plans – more targets and interventions that acknowledge their EHCP interventions. (We have targets as teachers too of course as part of the annual performance management cycle.) We have to complete forms for significant incidents – several most days which means a phone call home too and this documented in the child's communication log. If we are off sick, there's a return to work form to complete and if we have a hospital appointment, a 'request for absence' form. We regularly have to respond to random one-off tasks we receive by email. We have to attend a lot of meetings - briefings, team meetings and weekly CPD sessions -sometimes that involve more paperwork. And most importantly, we have to complete a record of concern if a child gives us any concern with respect to safeguarding. I'm sure there is more that I just cannot recall at the moment.

Like many teachers – especially those my age – I went into teaching for all of the first paragraph (well maybe not the violence!) and a fraction of the second. It’s the entirety of the second paragraph that means there is such a poor retention of staff in the profession. It’s not that teachers are lazy – far from it, they are a dedicated bunch and they have to be – it’s that they have intuited that all this paperwork means very little compared to the real part of the job. It is, for those of us that care about the children, something we have to get through that drains us so we have a little less of ourselves to give to those needy children.

So how has this ridiculous amount of paperwork in a job that is most importantly about people come about? Here is my theory. My daughter is doing a politics and philosophy degree, at home now because of Covid 19. She let me watch one of her lectures on neoliberalism and an interesting point was made that I have extrapolated from. Most of us think of neoliberalism as a system that makes a society move away from a collective, production focused, welfare state to a more individualistic, free-market, finance based economy. This is true and this model has gained more and more impetus politically over recent decades. The free market is enhanced by deregulation – so we would be forgiven for thinking this means less paperwork. However, for competition to thrive you need to be able to make comparisons and to make comparisons, you need to be able to monitor what’s going on. In business – this is usually easily done by applying the straightforward question – who is making the most money?  But this odd situation arrives when you apply the business model to something like education (which in itself is a rather odd thing to do). Somebody decided schools needed to be compared – regardless of the intake of pupils, the staffing and any other inequalities – so there came league tables. From league tables came the pressure to perform - as a school, as individual teachers and then for individual pupils. Over the years schools transferred this into monitoring every last drop of what teachers and pupils were doing and I would simply say this is not really doing anyone any favours. I would also argue, it has certainly gone too far.