09 Jul 2024
A secondary school science teacher has revealed why he won’t return to teach after what he claims were massive discrepancies in the house point system.
Damian Gaskin retrained as a teacher at the age of 47. He spent seven years teaching in London schools and more recently at Townsend Church of England School in High Oaks.
But he said his faith in the values of the leadership has been so shattered that he has resigned from a job he loved and will not return to teaching.
We wanted to give him a platform to explain the circumstances behind his decision…
In my classroom, I was able to make a community with high expectations and excellent behaviour, with honesty, decency and compassion at its heart. My students became role models and I am proud of each and every one of them. I knew that in a world that presents a lot of negativity, that highlights and glorifies indecency and selfishness we, in our little class, in our little part of St Albans, could be a place of security,safety and love.
If we do not aim for that as teachers, if we do not strive to create a place of honesty, justice and putting things right that have been wrong, how can we, as teachers, with any sincerity talk with moral authority about those who have misled the public in the great scandals of our time such as Hillsborough, Grenfell and the Post Office?
Schools love to talk about creating students who ‘go out to make a difference’, ‘to be the change’, who ‘go the extra mile’ and as some heads like to say ‘clean their own backyard’.
If you are in the privileged position of being a headteacher then you can be a beacon in the community. You can right wrongs. You can create a whole community where there is justice even if there is none outside the school gates.
You can show the students that there is hope and purpose without resorting to the behaviours of the adults they see around them on the worst excesses of TV and social media. You can be a role model and show the students they don’t have to behave like the politicians and the fossil fuel lobby and water company executives who simply avoid the truth and allow others to take the flack.
As a teacher it is my absolute responsibility to stand up for something very important in today’s society which is telling the truth.
As a role model, I always apologised to my students when I got it wrong. It’s absolutely key to getting their respect and, therefore, building that sense of positivity, safety and community; but not everyone shares my view.
If you are a parent with school-age children you will know that most schools have ‘house’ systems. Students are greatly encouraged to gain positive points and avoid negative. Negative behaviour points (in old money, ‘a good telling off’) might be called ‘consequence’ points or ‘sanction’ points.
At the beginning of the year there are assemblies about the importance of house points. Throughout the year, weekly assemblies highlight the houses that are winning and losing. At the end of Christmas and Easter terms, the tallies are dangled in front of the students encouraging them to do more, do better, display more positive behaviours. Many schools have the ongoing totals on their public facing websites.
It is a BIG deal for the students. It is like currency. It is an astonishingly powerful method of maintaining and building a loving community with values of decency and honesty and courtesy over poor behaviours. My system for awarding points was honed from seven years of trial and error, reflection and retrying: the kids absolutely adored it.
In my class you gained points for being a decent, honest human being, for example, for lending someone a pen, for being nice to someone, a constructive comment, helping someone, showing courtesy and yes, being honest.
In my class, ‘negative points’ and detentions became a thing of the past. I had two large displays of positive points on the classroom walls for each of my 11 classes and my form.
The students have a strong desire to win and be very proud of how their house is fairing, especially if it might win the big prize – the House Trophy awarded on the last day of the year.
But what if I told you some schools tweak the system? Or to be kind to them, sometimes the teacher responsible just does not care enough to take it seriously and do the maths until the last second, and their managers don’t bother to check either.
What if I then told you that having made a mistake the leadership go very, very, quiet. In fact, suggest it does not really matter?
I am sorry to say Townsend leadership deserve a big negative point on their end of year report. The school’s fine students and staff deserve much better.
Last June, 2023, I discovered that the house points awarded were being changed by a Townsend teacher responsible for the points system.
Points were being deducted without any explanation and teachers who had made notes of why students were being given positive points were not informed or consulted.
I could see this happening by logging into Arbor, the school information system, and seeing that my awards were being changed and hearing from students that they were not seeing the points they expected on the system.
At the beginning of July 2023 I approached a senior leader, whom at the time I completely trusted, with my concerns. I explained that all my emails to the teacher in charge had been ignored. To my knowledge this senior leader did nothing about it.
The great day arrived for the award of the House Trophy – the last day of the school academic year. This is NOT a ‘virtual assembly’ or a PowerPoint or a ParentMail announcement. These are the final moments before the summer holidays officially begin and when the whole school gathers together on the playing fields – a very rare occurrence in the school year.
There’s a public address system, trophies and a requirement to sit in the burning sunshine to listen to the results.
I had checked Arbor and I knew that even with the mysterious changes by the teacher, Exeter House had won by more than 700 points.
This was a big deal for the students of Exeter House who have often expressed how they had never won.
The teacher responsible turned on the microphone and talked about the ‘difficult calculation’ he had made to get the result and how everyone should be proud of themselves. He then tapped his phone (logging into Arbor, perhaps?) and then hesitated as if he was looking at something for the first time that didn’t seem quite as he expected.
After a moment he looked up and announced that the winning House was… Durham. He gave the biggest prize of the year to Durham who had lost by a country mile.
That was a year’s worth of hard work, honesty and decency of 150 students down the toilet.
Had I missed something? What was this ‘calculation’? The students left for their summer holidays. I returned to my class and I looked again at Arbor. It was clear as day, Exeter had won by a landslide.
We were in the last few hours of the academic year before everything and everyone goes into hibernation and no one takes your calls. I knew I only had minutes.
We had two deputy heads who were in charge of the school at that time. I emailed them both. I also emailed the teacher responsible asking for his ‘calculation’. He did not respond. And never has. Despite repeated requests neither this teacher nor the senior leadership have ever shown me this calculation.
One deputy did not respond. The other, who was leaving, passed the buck saying he had left it to the teacher to sort out. And left.
I was absolutely stunned that we could treat our students with such a lack of respect. I was so cross that I decided I could not go to the gathering of teachers to say goodbye to those leaving, and I want to apologise to those colleagues I would have liked to say goodbye to, but now you know why I was not there. I had to go and find a nice, peaceful place to reflect on what had just happened.
I consoled myself with the fact that in September we were gaining a new head and I thought that if I spoke to him at the beginning of the new term it would be put right immediately. I had high hopes. Imagine my surprise when having spoken to him and provided him with all the details, screenshots from Arbor, my unanswered emails asking questions and all my unanswered requests for this ‘calculation’ that I heard nothing more.
Then in November 2023 a senior teacher sidled up to me in the playground and said: ‘What good would it do to say anything about the House Point Trophy now? It’s November, the children will have all forgotten about. Don’t you agree?’
I did not. That response pretty much broke my faith in teaching. That and the new head doing nothing to announce the correct result or apologise to our students and put right its own wrongs.
I don’t believe our job is to teach our children that so long as the people they hurt forget they don’t have to say sorry. We are their guardians and role models and must be held to a much higher standard.
The fact is justice and honesty are not negotiable and if we get something wrong and someone discreetly gives us the chance to put it right we put it right. I gave the leadership that chance.
What a vast and wonderful lesson this could have been to the children; how society should behave, that a large body, a school, made up of highly respected ‘grown ups’ could make a mistake but then apologise to its children, be honest and then put it right. What a lesson in humility that would have taught them.
Instead, we did the same as all the others.
And so that’s why I won’t teach at Townsend from now on. I simply do not trust the senior leadership’s judgement.
Recently the headteacher of Townsend told me that my behaviour had fallen below his expectations. As the leader of a Church of England school he might wish to reflect on that famous verse in the Bible about taking the plank out of his own eye before the splinter in mine.
One of his favourite quotes to staff is that we have to ‘clean our own backyard’. It’s a shame he doesn’t walk the talk.
So congratulations Exeter House, Townsend School, for winning the House Trophy of 2022-2023. You won by an astonishing 704 points.
The school has refused to accept Damian’s ongoing concerns.
Headteacher at Townsend School, Anthony Flack, told the St Albans Times: “I am aware of some discrepancies with the awarding of house points last year, before I became headteacher.
“These were investigated at the time and appropriate action was taken.
“Our house system has been carefully crafted to foster a strong sense of community, competition, and camaraderie amongst our students, and I’m confident that it is working well.”
