As a relative newcomer to the field of education, I’ve only just discovered the online forums of the Times Educational Supplement. Forget the TES, which is to the educational establishment what the Church Times is to the Church of England. The forums are the place to go. It’s like being a fly on the wall in the staffroom of a large inner-city comprehensive after the headteacher has departed.
Above stairs, the writers are focused on highfalutin things like policy and research, but below stairs the posters are more concerned with day-to-day matters. I suspect that quite a few of them are English teachers because one of their favourite themes is the misuse of language.
To begin with, there’s the fact that their pupils haven’t mastered their mother tongue. They say ‘less’ when they mean ‘fewer’, ‘of’ when they mean ‘have’, and ‘borrow’ when they mean ‘lend’, as in, ‘Miss, can you borrow me a pen?’ Turns out plenty of teachers still attach some importance to good grammar, even if they aren’t allowed to teach it.
But worse — much worse — is the awful ‘eduspeak’ that infests every school like a biblical plague. Much of this lingo is imported from the business world — there’s plenty of ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘thinking outside the box’. You can’t be head of anything, either, as in ‘head of PE’. Rather, you’re the ‘director of PE’ — and the lower down the pay scale you go, the more grandiose the titles become. Thus, a librarian is now an ‘independent learning centre manager’.
Then there’s the school-specific jargon. When it comes to describing teachers and pupils, the key thing is not to use any words or phrases that hint at a hierarchical relationship. All traces of didacticism are strictly verboten. Thus, children are no longer ‘students’ (an unacceptable piece of jargon in its own right) but ‘learners’, and they aren’t taught in classrooms but in ‘learning environments’. Incidentally, the collective noun for a group of ‘learners’ is not ‘class’ but ‘client group’.
The posters on the forum are nearly all anonymous, which makes for a refreshing amount of candour. One gripes about a headteacher who is constantly saying ‘Let’s unpick this’ when ‘the “this” in question is not a jumper’, while another says that whenever she hears her ‘line manager’ use the phrase ‘at the end of the day’ she always mutters ‘night falls’ under her breath.
Another complaint is that teachers start out completely normal, only to begin spouting management gobbledegook the moment they’re promoted to the ‘SLT’ (senior leadership team): ‘We once had a head of sixth form (I mean director of post-16) who asked someone who looked out of place, “Are you a member of this learning community?” instead of, “Do you come to this school?” ’
A common theme of ‘eduspeak’ is replacing a word or phrase that could be construed as judgmental with one that’s painstakingly neutral. If a child is naughty, for instance, you have to describe his or her behaviour as ‘challenging’ rather than ‘bad’, and instead of punishing or disciplining them, their behaviour has to be ‘contained’. Better yet, use an acronym like ‘EBD’ (emotional and behavioural difficulties), which has the convenient implication that the child in question is suffering from a debilitating psychological condition rather than just being an idiot. You can’t use the word ‘idiot’, obviously. It’s more tactful to say they have ‘AEN’ (additional educational needs) or ‘SEN’ (special educational needs). If a child has ‘issues’ because his or her father is in prison and their mother a drug addict, you can’t say they come from a broken home. Rather, they have a ‘chaotic family background’.
It’s easy to be blasé about this, but is something more sinister going on? I think it’s symptomatic of the fact that it’s now virtually taboo for teachers to make any attempt to transmit their values to the children in their care. Only the official values, sanctioned by the state and embedded in the school’s curriculum, are acceptable. Thus, teachers are more or less required to ‘celebrate diversity’, whether racial, cultural or sexual, but woe betide the old-fashioned sports master who tries to convey the importance of impulse control or deferred gratification. It’s as though the teachers are forced, on pain of dismissal, not to pass on anything to children that might actually help them lead useful and productive lives.
Perhaps ‘eduspeak’ is no laughing matter after all.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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