Nothern Teacher Told To Sound 'More Southern'

Very recently a secondary school teacher, originally from Cumbria but currently working in the south, was sanctioned with an outrageous target to adapt her northern accent, by her own school, to sound more southern.

Descriptivism is the term used to describe the belief that the correctness of a person’s language is dependent on context and should be defined by what is appropriate in any context. Prescriptivism is the opposite – the belief that there is one correct way of speaking, no matter the context. A belief that I think is slowly on the downfall, a belief only followed by the older generations.

I believe descriptivism should be the linguistic mind-set of today’s society. It is much more common now a days, with new technology and transport, for people of different geographical backgrounds to come into close contact with one another. Even people born and raised in your own geographical locations are likely to talk differently to yourself. For example, I have friends that went to a school that was about a 10 minute walk away from mine, yet they seemed to have a whole variety of different slang. In addition, with the growing counterculture developing in our youth, new slang, dialect and even accents are often found to differ with each new generation. With this in mind, it is impossible for one to be a believer of prescriptivism without conversing with at least one person with a different way of speaking. The school in this article is quite clearly one of prescriptivism. This, I believe, is a contradiction with the development of our society.

Having read the article of a northern teacher being victimised by both her own school and Ofsted, I am outraged. I believe a person’s accent is something to be proud of, it’s a representation of your beloved hometown and precious childhood. Every region of England will have different accents, who has the right to say that theirs is the ‘most correct’ or to ban another person from talking in their natural voice.

To begin, I am in disbelief that an established organisation, like Ofsted, would have the courage to single out a teacher for a personal feature of hers that would have absolutely no effect on her teaching skills – the kind of skills that Ofsted should be judging. In their defence I do not know how strictly they commented on her accent but, nevertheless, they did. What angers me the most is the actions of the school, whether they were strictly told to tell this teacher to change her accent or not, they should have stood by her side, they should be as outraged as I am. Whereas, they seemed to just abandon their own employee, setting her this ludicrous of changing an unalterable aspect of her own personality.

The targets set by schools after Ofsted inspections are supposed to be SMART:

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Achievable

R – Realistic

T – Timed

Although, rather mockingly, they were very specific - in the sense that the school said she needed to sound ‘more southern’ - the school have not reached any of the requirements when setting their employee a target to improve. This is a disgrace and very unfair to this individual. How on earth does a person measure how southern they sound? What point of her southern sounding development we be considered her target? It is ridiculously unrealistic and impossible to put any sort of time frame on it.

This school could not be any more immoral. This woman now has to go into work every day, having to concentrate on changing just the way she speaks (on top of all the stress of being a secondary school teacher); in fear the she could potentially lose her job. There is no evidence to say that this woman is a bad teacher or even to say that any of her classes are negatively affected by her diverse accent, so there is absolutely no reason for her to be criticised in the way she has been. Could this potentially be an act of sexism? I never heard of a male teacher being criticised for the way he speaks.

I believe no one on this planet has the right to dictate what the ‘correct’ way of speaking is. We are all different and no one person sounds the same, so who is in the position to say that their way of speaking is ‘correct? The way we speak represents a part of our personalities and even demonstrates an aspect of our precious childhoods. The way you speak should be embraced and loved by all, if someone doesn’t like the way you speak, you shouldn’t like the way they think.