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Sharing resources is priceless and it should stay that way.

My mother’s attempts to get me involved in a variety of after school activities and clubs as a child taught me two important lessons about myself: I’m not a social butterfly and I am certainly not a natural team player. However, I have also learned that, despite the fact that I spend five hours of every day isolated from my peers and acting as a benevolent dictator in my classroom, teaching is a team sport.

I learned this largely through mentors and other colleagues who provided me with schemes of work, lesson plans or just someone to bounce around ideas with. However, in evenings of creative despair, the internet also regularly came to the rescue. Unfortunately, the website which was a lifesaver and an inspiration for much of my career, the TES, has started allowing teachers to charge for their resources. This is a move which I passionately disagree with for three main reasons:


  1. I’ve always been of the opinion that a lot of teaching is about rehashing lessons which someone else has already taught. Even if you have an original idea…it probably isn’t. Indeed, many teachers commenting on James Theobald’s blog about charging for resources and plagiarism (www.othmarstrombone.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/why-i-think-selling-resources-to-teachers-is-wrong/) have stated the same thing. However, standing in front of year eight and confidently teaching about soft engineering while secretly knowing the activity was designed by an online saviour (who saved you several hours of your evening) is drastically different to passing off someone else’s work as your own for monetary gain. Unfortunately, this type of plagiarism seems to be the case with some contributors on the TES.
  2. My head of faculty often tells me off for buying my own resources. I try to control myself, but if I want to make an outrageous display or create a ‘stream table’ to simulate a river, I like being able to get cracking with complete freedom and while I still have motivation. However, I don’t feel that teachers should ever feel obligated or pressured to do so. Equally, schools should not feel pressured to spend extra money on lessons or resources from other teachers and departments. Theobald put it excellently, by saying that by charging for resources, the TES is “exploiting their [teachers’] commitment to their job”.
  3. Most importantly, it may make me an idealist, but I believe that every teacher’s primary aim should be to help every pupil, regardless of whether they teach them or not. To offer resources on the condition of monetary gain sends an entirely different message. In contrast, the support I have received through unofficial teaching networks on Twitter and through the ‘hub’ provided by my school’s federation appear to still have that goal at heart.

The TES can offer as many ‘sales’ as it wants; so long as people can charge for resources, I won’t be returning.

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