Teacher To Tutor - Either Way, It Takes A Big Heart To Shape Little Minds.

It was 10 years ago I first entered the classroom. I had enough energy to excite the whole school community, enough bounce to bring learning to life and enough passion to teach the children from the heart as though they were my own. It was creative, fresh, exciting and above all it was about each individual child getting the very best learning journey, support and challenge for them.

It was about the children! I knew everything about them, because I made it more than a job to know how they tick and share my love for learning with them. Experiences they wouldn`t forget. Every week I would open my blank canvas of a page and let splatter on it a creative journey which would excite both the children and myself - they couldn`t get enough of it! And we bounced into class, our excitement transferring across the playground.

10 years later! I`m still fresh, passionate and devoted to teaching and learning. The difference? The Academy experience! Higher expectations, pressure, stress, one learning style to fit them all and move them forward as robots. Children purely being seen as data which helps or taints the school. No creative risk, just a structure resembling a business. With the Senior Leaders sat in a glass box on their computers, with silent government figures cracking the whip behind them. Do they know the children? Could they spare a moment to walk the corridors and name every child?

Programmes of work are bought in - dribbling a mundane approach to learning onto paper which the teacher can barely adapt. The class are treated as a whole, and there are so many of them and so little support that gaps are missed as the teacher is under the pressure to get them all to the same place, NO MATTER WHAT!! Just because they are in the lower ability set, doesn`t mean the experience will help them as they all have very different gaps in their learning and preferred methods of learning. The middle sets do as they`re told but can often get forgotten and the highers need more challenge. One term literacy will be the priority because numbers are slipping on the graph, next term numeracy is being taught triple the time until the children are brain dead from it and all literacy slumps again. And so the circle continues!

So where does that leave us? An uninspiring system failing to get it right! And your child being taken along for the ride. I speak from my own experience as a creative passionate teacher who just couldn`t fit in with this way of things - not because I am not adaptive or a academic rebel! But simply because the child like magic had vanished, and my hands were tied.

So my journey has led me to say farewell to the classroom that no longer inspires, and like so many respectable teachers who make a difference, we offer your child everything that school is failing to do. Knowing the child and giving them the unique journey they truly deserve.

It takes a BIG heart to shape little minds!