Those Who Can, Teach by Andria Zafirakou review – a lesson in education

At the beginning of March Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, referred to as for a “transformative” reform of the schools system in the wake of the pandemic, involving the introduction of a five-term 12 months and longer days to make sure youngsters meet up with their research. Williamson in contrast the scope of his “radical” reform to RA Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which had the formidable purpose of abolishing childhood inequality by offering free secondary education for all. Butler’s introduction of the eleven-plus examination and tripartite system of secondary faculties – grammar, secondary trendy and technical – proved controversial. Williamson’s proposals are equally problematic; head lecturers have labelled them “chaotic and confusing”.

Of the 49 people in authorities who’ve had management over the English faculties system since 1900, solely 4 beforehand taught in faculties themselves. As Andria Zafirakou, the winner of the 2018 Global Teacher prize, expresses it: “The people who sit in 10 Downing Street are like gods to us teachers.” That’s to say, they appear so distant, their actions so unintelligible to those that truly work inside faculties that they may as properly be gazing down from Mount Olympus, arbitrarily firing lightning bolts on to asphalt playgrounds.

In some ways Those Who Can, Teach, Zafirakou’s first guide, is a response to the federal government’s scattergun strategy to education, a plea for them to take discover of the pressures lecturers are more and more positioned beneath, and the way education coverage is damaging younger individuals. Her easy, direct model usually feels near a manifesto: “We are the ones who go above and beyond the duties we were employed for,” she writes.

Zafirakou drives her college students house from faculty when there are gangs mendacity in look forward to them exterior the playground, washes and mends their faculty garments when others mock them for smelling, and runs weekend and vacation artwork golf equipment so pupils who discover it onerous being at house have someplace to go. It isn’t any surprise that the career has a burnout drawback. She watches many lecturers round her hand over; 15.3% who began working in 2017 had been now not in instructing by the next 12 months.

“We are the ones alerting social services to child-protection issues, severe poverty, or the fallout of police intervention,” Zafirakou writes. It is this type of granular data, she believes, that can not be “captured by the facts and figures” the federal government focuses on, and which makes the concept of fixing the problems confronted by right now’s college students by means of extra rigorous exams (as Michael Gove did in 2010) or making certain youngsters stay silent in corridors (one other Williamson proposal) seem laughable.

Zafirakou has labored for greater than 15 years as an arts and textiles instructor at Alperton group faculty in Brent, probably the most disadvantaged London boroughs. As the daughter of Greek migrants, “it is written into my blood and bones how isolating it can feel to arrive in a different country”. To guarantee these at Alperton perceive that their various backgrounds are recognised and revered, she has realized to greet dad and mom and pupils in dozens of languages. Those Who Can, Teach is a file of the forces of empathy and vitality that drive her as a instructor.

Those Who Can, Teach is bookended by Zafirakou’s expertise of successful the Global Teacher prize, which offered her with each a platform and the funds ($1m prize cash) to enact lasting change in instructing. She has since arrange a profitable charity, Artists in Residence, which arranges for skilled artists to spend time in faculties throughout the UK. Clanchy in her guide consists of a dialog with one other instructor who needs she had saved a file of the methods she supported excluded pupils at her faculty. “But she was too busy with the actual good she was doing,” Clanchy explains, “so I have written this down instead.” Such a distinction is helpful in terms of assessing Zafirakou’s legacy: although her guide is evident and informative, it’s her fantastic achievements as a instructor, made evident in this account, that stay the extra spectacular feat.