Taskmasking and the Collapse of Trust
We are not okay. But we’ve been trained to act like we are (Toxic Resilience). Teachers everywhere are cracking under the pressure, papering over the cracks with a new form of quiet self-harm: taskmasking. Take your impossible workload, cut it into 50 meaningless micro-tasks, tick them off like a good little worker—and no one above notices you’re drowning.
This isn’t resilience. This is bullshit.
Schools are collapsing under the weight of BS bureaucracy, and instead of support, we get scrutiny. Instead of time, we get tasks. No wonder people are quitting. But for those of us still here? We’re keeping the lie alive. We’re breaking ourselves to keep up appearances. And the system, the MATs, the CEOs, fucking love it.
Problem
Education has become a corporate parody of itself. We’re being buried under a mountain of admin, expected to track, log, quantify and analyse every breath a student takes. As a result, teachers aren’t teaching. We’re box-ticking. We’re taskmasking—pretending to be productive so someone else can have a graph for SLT to wank over.
Want an example? Try this. During report writing season, a senior leader actually said: “Just make sure there are numbers on there.” Not accuracy. Not insight. Not truth. Just a number. Pick one. Any one. That’s the level of integrity we’re dealing with.
Or the fucking KS3 tracker. What the actual fuck? We’re supposed to enter dozens of data points based on “student performance”. But to do it properly takes hours. Hours we don’t have. So, we fake it. We plug in numbers. We invent progress. Because the real crime isn’t lying—it’s being late cos the CEO is edging himself waiting for the data…and he is close!. The point is, leadership demands so much data, and so often, that it ends up being pure fiction. This isn’t analysis. It’s a fantasy. Hell, it’s a fucking kink! There, I said it!
Causes
Education stopped being about people and started being about metrics. Because every decision is filtered through the lens of “what will Ofsted think?” Because leadership is too fucking scared to stand up to the system, so they pass the pressure downward.
We’ve replaced trust with surveillance. Experience with templates. Creativity with compliance.
We’re trained to fear doing things “our way” in case it doesn’t match the latest bullshit PowerPoint from the last learning and teaching briefing, which was itself stolen from a TED Talk by someone who hasn’t taught in ten years. Or, they “heard it on a podcast” (Side note: Who the fuck listens to teacher podcasts? RED FLAG!)
Meanwhile, the government slashes funding, cuts services, and treats teachers like political pawns. They label us lazy and greedy while we hold the country’s future together with Pritt Stick and 40-hour weekends. And they wonder why people are running for the hills…or jobs at Aldi.
Effects
Here’s where the rage turns into despair. Because the kids are the ones paying the price.
When we’re too burnt out to care, when the system forces us to fake it, students get less. Less planning. Less creativity. Less humanity. We don’t have time to give proper feedback. We’re too busy updating pointless trackers with made-up numbers. We don’t have time to check in with the quiet kid in the back—too many policies to implement. We don’t even have the headspace to reflect on what went well in a lesson. We’re in survival mode.
SEN students get shoved down the priority list. Vulnerable kids don’t get noticed. And meanwhile, everyone’s patting themselves on the back because the “data looks good”. It’s a fucking joke.
We’re being forced to trade authenticity for admin. The kids deserve better, and we know it—but we’re too broken to give it to them.
Solutions
We gotta stop bullshitting and start stripping back the crap.
Leadership: if you want honest data, give teachers time to gather it. Want real teaching? Protect planning time. Want staff to stay? Cut the performative nonsense and trust us to do the job we trained to do. No more fake “consultations” about workload that just lead to a reworded version of the same problem.
Start binning pointless trackers. Axe the meetings that could have been emails. Cancel the emails that didn’t need to exist at all. If a task can’t realistically be done in a working week, it shouldn’t be asked for. Full stop. Fuck you!
And for the love of all that’s sacred, stop mistaking exhaustion for excellence. If your staff are constantly working late and never saying no, that’s not a “strong work ethic”. That’s trauma. A no, a chocloate fucking orange isn’t gratitude – it’s a fuckign insult!
Conclusion
This system is eating itself. We either burn it down and rebuild, or keep watching good teachers collapse while pretending everything’s fine. *lights match and grins!
Taskmasking is not efficient. It’s not sustainable. It’s a coping mechanism for a toxic system. And, if leadership doesn’t get serious about fixing the actual problem, then they’re part of it.
Enough of the bullshit. Enough of the fake smiles. Enough of the empty praise for surviving another term of organised chaos. Fix it!
