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Don't go and teach British `monsters', warn teachers recruited from
Independent, The (London), Aug 4, 2001 by Mary Braid
WHAT SOUTH African supply teachers Eldrid Petersen and Renee Fahrenfort are doing on their summer holidays may embarrass Britain. The pair are warning colleagues back home - now being wooed by British education authorities to solve the dire teacher shortages - that even violent, poverty-ridden townships cannot prepare them for the foul-mouthed, undisciplined chaos of schools in Hackney, east London.
Mr Petersen and Ms Fahrenfort arrived in Britain earlier this year to teach in the east London borough with seven other teachers from Cape Town. But all nine say the absence of discipline in Hackney schools is shocking, with pupils as young as seven beyond the control of teachers.
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Mr Petersen told South African newspapers that some of the children were "monsters", and Ms Fahrenfort has been on Cape Town radio telling of her "nightmare" month with the pupils of the London borough's Laburnum Primary. "They recruit with the lure of 12 rands to the pound," says Ms Fahrenfort, earning three times more than she could at home. "They tell you the schools are difficult, and you think that because you are South African and you have worked in Mitchell's Plain [in the bleak, infamous, gang-ridden Cape Flats] and in Khayelitsha [Cape Town's huge sprawling black township] that you will cope but it is not true."
The day Ms Fahrenfort, 34, arrived at Laburnum she saw a little boy stabbing another with a pencil. At home, she would have pulled them apart. But she was told any physical contact with a British pupil could result in an allegation of abuse. She says she just had to stand there telling them to stop, as instructed.
Hackney's South African teachers clearly think some kind of madness has gripped British schools. Classroom discipline, Ms Fahrenfort claims, had broken down at Laburnum, judged as a "failing" school by Ofsted this year. One day, an eight-year-old boy ripped up her lesson notes after being asked to sit down. He then poured a bottle of water in her handbag. When she asked him why, he told her to "fuck off".
When she sent the boy to the headteacher, he returned with three chocolate biscuits. "I did not think it was the best way to discipline a child but she said I was new to the country and needed to become acquainted with positive reinforcement."
Ms Fahrenfort, a teacher for 14 years, is strongly against corporal punishment, but she is frustrated by what she sees as the impotence of the British teacher. She says her hands were tied when the same eight-year-old boy starting jumping on a table. "All the other children started fighting and all I could say to the boy was stop it, this is inappropriate behaviour, as I had been told to do. The children could not hear me for the noise." She was rebuked for giving a child a "menacing" stare. She admits she glared. "Let's face it, it was about all I could do," she says.
Mr Petersen, a former headteacher who left his teacher wife and two children at home to make more money, was dismayed when a pupil he stopped from assaulting another at London Fields Primary attacked him with a brick, then accused him of assault. "Luckily, other teachers witnessed the event and the charges were dropped," he says. "The school and fellow teachers have been wonderfully supportive, but for a long time I feared losing my job.
"I'm from Mitchell's Plain, one of South Africa's most violent communities. I believed if I could survive there London wouldn't be all that bad. But it's much worse than you could ever imagine."
Ms Fahrenfort blames a lack of respect for teachers for the chaos and says Britain "is getting the children it deserves". Mr Petersen blames the poor discipline on lack of parental involvement. Incredibly, given the level of violence, corruption, rape and abuse in many South African schools, the nine Cape Town teachers have formed a London support group that has been flooded with calls from other beleaguered South African teachers.
They say many South African teachers are offered no induction at their allocated schools. Some even find their promised job no longer exists or are dismissed because they are "not coping". Often the agencies that recruit them offer little follow-up support.
This week, the Education minister, Stephen Timms, said schools would have enough teachers by September. The Government claims there are 4,690 teacher vacancies, though independent surveys put the figure as high as 8,000. There are up to 5,000 foreign teachers filling the gap. This summer headteachers are recruiting again in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, though Poland and Russia are also now recruitment areas.
The global harvesting of teachers is controversial. This year, Kader Asmal, South Africa's education minister, appealed to Britain to stop recruiting teachers in his country, and the South African Democratic Teachers' Union had condemned the UK for "cherry-picking" a developing country's best human resources. But South African teachers of all races say that despite the brain drain the country cannot afford to employ them and tens of thousands have been laid off. The South African government says retrenchment and redeployment was necessary to equalise pupil-teacher ratios between rich (generally white) and poor (generally black) schools.
