The Secret Teacher writes an honest letter home

The Secret Teacher writes a devastatingly honest letter that can never be posted. The letter that can't be sent to your pupils' parents is published here: "I'm part of the this system. And I had to confess"

I only teach your daughter one subject, RE, which she is forced to do and she isn't terribly interested in it. I see her once a week for 50 minutes. As there are 30 other students in the class this means that, if I did nothing else all lesson, I could spend about 100 seconds with her as an individual a week. To teach her, to get to know her, to understand her as a young person. But, as you well know, there are some children in her class who demand much more of my time. This inevitably means that some students will be left with nothing. Unfortunately, that applies to your child. I'll be honest, I haven't held a proper conversation with her in weeks.

I teach 400 children. Slightly more, actually, but we'll call it 400. That means your daughter counts for 0.25% of the children I teach. It is difficult for me to honestly and accurately tell you anything about her, so please forgive me if I speak in vague generalities at parents' evening and try to avoid using your daughter's name. I might have forgotten it.

Read more here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2012/may/19/secret-teacher-letter-home

I had to read it three times to be sure it wasn't me!

It is absolutely spot-on. The only gripe I have with it is that it doesn't deal with the divisive issue of the Exam Board's guided hours. For R.S. the guided hours are between 120 and 140 hours, as with all other Humanities subjects. However, in my experience History and Geography get well over the upper limit while R.S. - consigned to 1 lesson a week  -gets considerably less. It is at this point that managers tend to put emphasis on the word "guided", as if teaching well below the minimum is O.K and you are still expected to get the grades, while the teacher puts emphasis on 120-140, as in our teaching time should be somewhere between the two.