Teaching

The Guardian may have a new look but its advertisements for teachers have not changed much, with a selection being offered in the snap left.

The director of social pedagogy particularly caught my eye, as being particularly obscure, at least to me. The display advertisement on the facing page called for the usual stuff like 'proven track record of delivering excellent people centred services', but left me none the wiser. But I give them the benefit of the doubt, as I know of the excellent work that the Camphill people do with adults with special needs in Devon. The operation there once attracting saintly people from places like Denmark and Austria, people who were content to devote large chunks of their lives to special needs for scant reward, but an operation which now seems to more mainstream.

Or I could be head of geography and ethics at a school in central London, named for one of my Canadian cousins. Perhaps ethics is what the very correct team in Camden (the people who evacuated tower blocks in the middle of the night because of the risk of fire, in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy) call what we used to call RI or RK and which in my case doubled with music rather than with geography.

While social science was not a subject at all.

Note also the number of schools which appear to be part of small trusts, say with 10-20 schools each. Trusts which will no doubt accommodate even more highly paid middle managers (without teaching duties) than the LEA's that they are in large part replacing. Let's hope their remuneration committees have more teeth and more common sense than those in the tertiary sector, aka universities.

PS. the good news is that yesterday I, quite by chance, tweeted a chaffinch in our back garden, the first time for years. And this morning, a couple of long tailed tits - which I used to confuse with coal tits, which also have black and white heads. A confusion which I think I have now dissipated.