Rule 32 - Enjoy the Little Things...

 

This is actually a post about teaching, but please don't let that stop you from reading...

So I teach in a fairly small school, no more than about four hundred students spread across seven year groups - Yikes! That is small now I put it into words.

There are some big advantages to working in a small school or company - you get to know your kids or client base, you have close working relationships with your colleagues. This means that you can have a disproportionate impact as your voice is much louder and only has to reach a relatively small audience. 

Here is stock footage of a 'classroom' with not many kids in it.

This has meant that I have been able to effect change here on a fairly dramatic scale. I have rewritten the entire KS3&4 curriculum, I have moved my subject to a different exam board, introduced a new A level, reformed the assessment system, led a CIS domain application, run training sessions and mentored new staff. Few! That explains why I'm tired.

The ability to have a disproportionate amount of impact is one of the most attractive features of working in a small school or business. However, it can also be a downside - negative voices are equally resonant and can make the atmosphere more unpleasant as they are less likely to be drowned out. Fortunately where I currently work the atmosphere is more positive than negative.

The class sizes are generally much smaller than in the UK too. I teach classes in years 7,8 and 10 all of which are now at 16 students. Even when I had my year 11 and 13 classes that only added another 16 students in total - this is ridiculous - I was teaching 64 students! In my last year at my previous school I taught 124 students before we got to the exam leave - that's nearly double. 

All of this means I just know my classes much better and I still teach a fair percentage of the kids in the school. Add in my ECAs and boarding duties and I really have got to know the majority of the students. Back home I did know a lot of kids - I'd been at the school a fair while - but it was still nothing like here. Of course I knew the kids in my classes, but you really an be much more individualised in your approach when there are 16 or fewer kids in a class. In fact education research suggests that class size is not a significant effect factor in student performance until it drops to 16 or fewer. I can believe it too. Here, I can mark more work, do more specific feedback, have more individualised approaches to learning and it doesn't cost my every last ounce of my personal resources as it was doing in the UK.

The real plus side to education in this context is not the resourcing; it is not the freedom from UK government using you as a political football and interfering in the curriculum; it is not even the removal of the ever present threat of Ofsted. No, it is the class sizes. Okay, all of these previous factors help, but the actual difference is the reduction in administrative workload that comes with teaching half the number of students. There is no reduction in the planning and I'm also running a faculty and more heavily involved in the wider life of the school. I commit at least as much time at school as I did back in the UK, but the difference in the pressures on me and my ability to influence the direction of my subject, faculty and wider school all are factors that mean the job is less stressful.

It basically comes down to the difference between stress and pressure - stress is a build up of pressure beyond your ability to manage it, whereas manageable pressure is something that can be positive. The pressure here is manageable - okay I do wish there were more hours in the day, but still, it's broadly fine and this all comes down to scale.

There is a flip side to working in a small school or business: you cannot benefit from economies of scale. In our school we all have to take on multiple roles and distributed responsibility can only be distributed so far. We have limited human resources upon which to draw. In the UK, where my school was four times bigger, we had a much deeper and broader talent pool to dip into. The same is true in companies, it becomes a trade off between flexibility, agility and strength. Small institutions may be more agile and can be more flexible, but bigger ones tend to have much more strength and endurance.

It's going to be an interesting contrast as I pivot back to a more corporate and lager scale school, although this is something that I am used to from my time in the UK.

What I can conclude is that there is a real joy in working in a small school with a tightly knit community and an effective and happy team. I have really enjoyed this last 12 months and will always remember my time here fondly.