StoatAubergine

Tag: teachers

  • Teaching, Profit, and the Stories We Tell to Stay Comfortable.

    Teaching, Profit, and the Stories We Tell to Stay Comfortable.

    There is an old saying that people do not like seeing laws or sausages being made.

    For teachers, the same could be said of wealth generation.

    Teaching is imbued with a public sector ideology. It is labour that transcends renumeration; work that’s a calling, not a demand. The children, after all, are our future. But can teachers in the private sector be squeamish about supporting, even actively increasing their school’s wealth creation? Is there a friction between whether teaching is caught between public sector virtue and private sector profit propagation?

    When I was a social worker, a not insignificant part of the job satisfaction came from being paid by the taxpayer. I was answerable to the community I served. This is a narrow view of course, but it was the uranium rod of truth that powered my ethics and beliefs.

    And like social work, teaching is often imagined as sitting above ordinary economic logic. It is framed as a public good, a moral practice, a form of labour whose value exceeds its price. Teachers do not do it “for the money”. Education, we are told, is not a commodity. These ideas are repeated so often that they begin to feel like truths rather than choices.

    And they are powerful truths. A good teacher rarely leaves your memory, and their instruction quietly shapes the futures of young people across the world – and can you really put a price on that?

    Take that same ideology, however, and deliberately structure it for wealth creation—for private equity firms, individuals, or publicly listed companies—and it is hardly surprising that some teachers begin to feel a strain.

    This should be caveated. Many of these same teachers have chosen to take their skills into a labour market—often overseas—that offers higher remuneration than state school wages and, in some cases, a better quality of life. To paraphrase my favourite line from the 1994 Kevin Smith movie ‘Clerks’, when a character is challenged about the innocent lives lost when the Death Star is destroyed:

    “They knew what they were getting into. They knew who they were working for.”

    Still, I don’t want to be disingenuous to private schools. This isn’t a class rant, certainly not from someone who is happily employed at one.

    Teaching carries a powerful moral inheritance. It is one of the few professions still routinely described in vocational terms: service, care, dedication, sacrifice. That inheritance matters. It protects teaching from being reduced to a transaction and teachers from being treated as interchangeable service workers.

    But moral inheritance also carries constraints. It shapes what can be said out loud.

    In particular, it creates discomfort around money. To speak too openly about efficiency, cost, productivity or return on investment risks sounding crude, even unethical. The language of markets is tolerated at the edges of educational discourse, but rarely allowed into its moral centre.

    This makes a certain sense in the public sector, where education is explicitly funded as a collective good. It becomes more complicated when teaching takes, even actively takes place inside private institutions.

    Private schools are not naïve about economics. They must recruit, retain, invest, compete and plan for long-term sustainability. Fees do not simply maintain buildings; they fund futures. Yet even in fee-paying contexts, there is often a reluctance to name the relationship between teaching and wealth generation directly.

    Instead, financial realities are softened through moral language. Schools speak of reinvestment, of quality, of excellence, of outcomes for children. Profit, if it exists at all, is described as incidental or virtuous—something that happens almost by accident on the way to doing good.

    Teachers are rarely told explicitly that their labour generates institutional value; that reputation converts into enrolment; that enrolment underwrites salaries and expansion. Everyone understands this. It is simply not spoken plainly.

    The result is a curious duality. Schools operate in markets, while teachers are encouraged to think of themselves as existing above them.

    The tension here is not simply between public and private sectors. It lies deeper, in the collision of two incompatible logics that teaching is increasingly asked to inhabit simultaneously.

    One logic treats education as a moral and civic practice. Its value is long-term, diffuse and social. Its outcomes may not be immediately visible, and their worth cannot be easily quantified. The other treats education as a service purchased by families. Its value must be demonstrable, comparable and timely. Outcomes must justify cost. Teachers are asked to hold the first logic as their professional identity while delivering the second as their professional output.

    This is not hypocrisy. It is structural contradiction.

    Most teachers are not opposed to schools being financially healthy. They want stability, good resources and fair pay. What unsettles them is not the existence of money, but the pretence that it is irrelevant. When teachers are asked to maintain public-sector moral identity while absorbing private-sector pressures, something gives. Often it is not performance, but trust. Cynicism creeps in. Branding language feels invasive. Metrics feel misaligned. Burnout is framed as personal failure rather than systemic tension. This is sometimes mistaken for ideological resistance to markets. More often, it is a response to being asked to live inside an unacknowledged contradiction.

    Education does generate economic value. Acknowledging this does not diminish its moral importance. What corrodes professional integrity is the refusal to hold both truths at once. Private education will remain ethically uneasy for as long as it relies on public-sector virtue while operating on market logic. Teachers deserve honesty about the systems they work within—not euphemism, not moral fog, and not polite silence.

    I spent three years working in the admissions and marking department of a private school and now teach within one. I have lived both sides of the contradiction. If private schools wish to claim moral seriousness, they must find transparent ways to articulate both the role of wealth creation and the responsibility of educating future citizens of a shared world.

  • Is there a place for ‘unconditional positive regard’ in a whole school policy?

    Is there a place for ‘unconditional positive regard’ in a whole school policy?

    Unconditional positive regard (UPR) does exactly what it says on the tin. It demands of the listener (therapist, teacher, social worker etc) that whatever behaviour (within reason) is being exhibited or whatever disclosures are coming forth (again, within reason) – one must act with a positive and empathetic mindset irrespective of the content. In other words – park your own opinion and judgement at the door and simply accept all that is being offered.

    It originates from the work of therapist and psychologist Carl Rogers, in which it formed the fulcrum of his ‘Client Centred’ therapeutic approach. In my first year of social work training, I spent three months at a local Primary school and my time was equally divided between supporting academic pull-out groups and working with the school’s counsellor/therapist. Her approach aligned firmly with that of Carl Rogers and his ‘Client Centred Therapy’. Forgive me, I am understating…she was a card-carrying acolyte of Carl Rogers! She had a laser-focused stare which melted the side of my head on any occasion where I mis stepped and offered a child a solution to their problem.

    As a form of therapy, it sounds pretty straightforward, right? Certainly the initial part of the process; accept any statements, thoughts, opinions or beliefs without condition or judgement. However, it is a great deal harder than it sounds. It goes without saying that it is very effective with children where trust is paramount. Believe me, when trying to understand what is troubling a child, you are undertaking an archaeological dig, not a fracking contract, and unconditional positive regard is one of your most effective tools.  It does require training and not only training in terms of how to deliver it therapeutically, but also one must reflect deeply on one’s own power, prejudices and motivations when employing this approach in action.

    Which leads to three worries I have when I see its prevalence within school behaviour policies, or its wording included on school websites.

    Firstly, a short philosophical concern. There may be deontological issue with this approach within the school context of using unconditional positive regard to modify behaviour. If Child A is engaging in behaviours that are disruptive and policy dictates an unconditional positive regard approach – that tactic is not within the ‘good will’ of therapy.  In other words, the teacher isn’t a therapist engaging with the child in a client centred way seeking to uncover slowly and methodically what is troubling a child and therefore how other strategies would ameliorate. They are using it as a specific means to an end which would not, in most cases, build robust pathways to better mental health.

    Secondly, as discussed above, this way of working requires training. There’s an assumption (in my view) that any adult who has undertaken training to work with children would either have come across UPR explicitly or at least engaged in it heuristically. I absolutely worked explicitly with UPR as a social worker – but not once as a teacher. Teacher training does not major or minor in child development; that’s something you just pick up on the job. Therefore, there could develop faulty models of working within this method. Furthermore, an effective and meaningful use of UPR entails deep levels of discussion and reflections with line managers to ensure the practice is being undertaken effectively – meaning training isn’t just required for teachers, but leaders as well.

    My final concern is the use of the term itself within a school context. Fundamentally, how children are regarded is conditional. You are regarded as academically successful on the condition of your marks. Your behaviour and how it is regarded is conditioned upon whether you receive ‘house points’ or ‘conducts’. But outside of how a school conditionally regards its pupils through is administrative whole school systems, one can’t escape that fact that individual teachers will regard individual children on whole range of conditions both objective and of course, subjective. Therefore, any school which includes UPR as a whole school policy would need to include clear advice and guidance on this approach to be understood unambiguously by its employees.

    Unconditional Positive Regard belongs squarely within the any SEN or therapeutic department of a school. To insist upon its ideology outside of its natural habitat will require training for staff and all levels of leadership and caveats within any whole school behaviour policy. Otherwise, it is at best a way of acting that assumes the good will, patience, or innate skill of its workforce or a worst it is simply a ‘hot button’ phrase to drive numbers and create a ‘feel-good’ narrative in the school’s marketing.