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Just been glancing through timeline to see HE lecturers complaining about the labour of “unteaching” “poor” FE/6th learning, blaming teachers. I’ve thought this many times since moving sector - HE lecturers would find a week in FE truly eye-opening.
Your teaching week of about 12 hours tops at at high load in HE? Double it then add in a few extra hours of unexpected cover for poorly colleagues. You will have 2 hours of uninterrupted desk time on a very good week.
The time allocated as part of your working week for marking? You can forget it. Marking is what happens at evenings & weekends, or during the holidays.
Time in lesson to actually focus on how to structure an essay, including the contentious introduction? Time for critical engagement? A massive risk because there is a densely populated scheme of work covering all prescriptive content for assessment, which has to be learnt.
Why not be a bit brave? Well, you should be demonstrating bravery, but only during a 2 week observation window which you will need to also provide a books worth of paperwork on the students, the lesson, & evidence of every point you are meeting this year’s Ofsted requirements.
About those. They can change, sometimes annually, sometimes between different observers. Be prepared for one manager to tell you you’ve failed to allow innovative tech use by not designing a phone activity for students, & another to declare phones lead to disengagement. And smile
You will also be fed regular and contradictory advice about what HE is “looking for”. You can be prepared for (some) Russell Group admissions tutors to treat your students & what you have worked on together with disdain.
The point of this explanation? I think HE has massive problems, some likely to grow without resistance.
But the confidence of (secure) HE workers in trashing the work of their colleagues who’ve seen students through earlier education shows a lack of critical engagement with the conditions of the wider sector. Reducing student performance to “good” & “bad” teachers is routine in FE.
HE lecturers who replicate this narrative so popular with those who police & restrict the teaching possible in FE and other post-16 ed may well find the conditions their colleagues work in are coming their way sooner than expected.
