Madam, - Teachers (of which I am one) are scared of league tables. The reason is not that we are frightened of being caught out as poor performers. The vast majority of us do a fine job, though that does not mean we could not all use positive criticism and more openness about how we perform in the classroom.
What we are scared of is that we alone will shoulder the workload of trying to lift standards - that once again parents (whom league tables are supposed to facilitate) will be let off the hook. I am talking here about parents who fail to see to it that their children do some work.
We are scared that we will be compared unfavourably with teachers in schools whose teachers are paid by the State even though they can charge fees in the thousands. You aren't paid anything extra for working in a disadvantaged secondary school. All you get extra is stress and early retirement. We have already seen the meagre response to our request for help in tackling declining discipline in schools - a few million out of a budget of billions!
In Britain, the result of league tables was a mass exodus of teachers from the profession - not because they were poor performers but because the state required them to do hours and hours of paperwork after dealing with poorly behaved pupils for a day. The idea behind this paperwork was simply PR and accountability. It didn't improve standards that much, because an unmotivated student will do only so much. Only recently has Tony Blair realised that you have to allow schools greater independence in choosing their intake so that those students who want to do well can sit with similar students.
Any chance of that here? - Yours, etc,
JACK DAVIES, Johnstown Park, Dublin 11.