This is something that breaks my heart and has made me quite ill - but it must be said. Bournemouth Adult Learning are a bunch of ***** (please fill in your own expletive, it can't be worse than mine). After a very successful set of AS level marks (3 As, 2 Bs, 1 C), which were won in spite of my sticking to the rules and the other AS tutor making them up, I find that I am without an A2 course and my students have nowhere to go.
I was informed by the College that my course was to be cancelled due to low numbers . Cancelled? But what about Abi Kremer's identical course? She had the same number of students on hers. Oh well, they say, her course is more cost effective. So that's the reason that 3 of my brilliant students are now without a course... it's not cost effective. I explained that if the college had the courtesy to discuss this with me I might have persuaded them to move centrally (even cheaper than Abi's course - ooh wow), but they weren't interested.
So I resigned.
The resignation was not just as a result of their incredible stupidity, but also as a reaction to their continued rejection of all pensioners.
They prattle on and on about EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY, but if you're over 60, screw you. They've taken away all your concessions ...sorry, you can still get them if you are a blind lone parent black lesbian earning less than 12p a week...or better still, YOU'RE A MUSLIM OR IMMIGRANT.
Oh yeah and they've made all the courses accredited - so you now have to take exams.
And how many pensioners want to take exams? They just want to do a bit of painting and drawing, with help from a nice tutor in a nice friendly atmosphere.
But that's not what Adult Ed is all about now. Oh no. It's all lesson plans, schemes of work, course/learner/tutor evalutions/assessments that go on for ever and ever. The latest is RARPA - where the learner (we don't call them students any more) has to evaluate how much they've learned and when they learned it. AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON HEALTH AND BLOODY SAFETY!!! When will people EVER learn to take responsibility for themselves again? I had to fill a full report to take my students 5 minutes down the road to the library for God's sake AND I had to seriously consider their a) getting knocked down by a bus (we have dangerous buses in Bournemouth) b) a terrorist attack c) bookcases falling down on top of them d)them falling down the stairs e) the lift plumetting them all to their squishy deaths. And so on. I should have added...e) alien abduction f) falling through the space/time continuum and g)meeting Tom Cruise, converting to Scientology and therefore missing the library exhibition.
I was being buried in a mountain of useless, pointless paperwork, which only served to indulge the ever increasing admin staff. And yes, they now had it on paper that I was doing the exact right thing, down to the minute - but hey! I could have made it up -and, here's a thought, maybe (just maybe) the other tutors did too - particularly the crap ones. God help us. The nanny state has taken over and taken away all the decent tutors and replaced them with lying automatons, who go through the motions to no ones benefit.
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