Ruth Lue-Quee believes education is in her blood – she is the third generation of teachers in her family. But now she has lost faith in the system, left the profession and sends her own children to private schools.
“My grandma was a headteacher in a state school. My mum was a teacher in a state school. I became a deputy headteacher in a state primary aged 27. It was all I ever wanted to do and all I ever wanted to be. I studied a bachelors of education and I remember my mum saying, ‘If you do a BEd, it’s not like an English degree where you can do lots of different things. It qualifies you to be a teacher,’ and I wanted that. Teaching is a vocation, I gave it my all and it took over my life,” she says. “I loved it. But during the time I was a teacher, things changed.”
She says changes to the school system started in 2014 when then education secretary Michael Gove introduced the new curriculum. “Teaching became less for the children and more to tick boxes for somebody who’s never taught in a classroom and doesn’t understand the value of relationships and nurture and how children learn,” she believes. She found that assessments became a major primary school focus.
Shorts
“We’ve obviously had SATs for a very long time, and everybody knows the stats are purely for the school. But we now have the reception baseline, done on screen, that children do in the first few weeks of school,” she explains. “That means the teacher is taken away from important, quality time getting to know the children and developing relationships [to administer the tests]. It’s basically not looked at again until the child leaves Year 6 to measure the school. It has nothing to do with the children.”
