Secret Teacher: My school is teaching students to plagiarise

Strong principles and hard work: this is what drew me to teaching. I believed I could help to promote honest, rigorous research and spark a sense of curiosity and wonder. My background in academia inspired me to bring the principles of academic integrity to schools, hopefully providing my students with a strong foundation in critical thinking and analysis.

Now, though, pressure from my school’s senior leadership team to abandon these ideals have left me wondering if teaching is truly what I hoped it could be.

My problems started when I was marking essays from some sixth form politics students. In the first paragraph of one student’s response, I noticed a word that made me pause – it reflected degree-level knowledge of the subject. Had the student gone on to research this topic in more depth? Or had they, perhaps, copied from a source without including the citation? I ran the papers through a plagiarism checker.

More than half the content was unoriginal. A significant portion of the student’s work had been lifted directly from an online textbook, and another fraction was taken from paid essay service websites.

This was not the first time I’d encountered plagiarism, of course. Students have occasionally tried to submit unoriginal work to me, from copied poems to an entire BBC article handed in as a research project. But this was the most telling example of high-effort plagiarism I’d seen, stitched together from a wide variety of sources. Simple words and phrases were altered throughout the piece, which suggested knowledge that outright plagiarism was wrong (but maybe poor attempts at paraphrasing were acceptable).

I emailed my colleagues to explain the situation. What were the policies regarding plagiarism? How should I handle this? Clearly, I said, it was a severe breach of academic integrity and needed to be treated seriously.

The response shocked me. I was told that I was lucky to have only encountered one plagiarised essay; that making students memorise textbooks is an unfortunate part of teaching, and that students often lack creativity and imagination. In short, plagiarism is not truly an issue. Everyone does it.

A further meeting in school the following week confirmed my suspicions that the incident was being downplayed and viewed dismissively by other staff. I was also actively discouraged from speaking to the student involved and, seeing the resistance from management, felt pressured to bite my tongue.

Since then, I’ve witnessed students research academic papers online to extend their understanding of a topic, and then simply copy and paste blocks of text into their writing. When asked about it, many students argue that other teachers allow it. I decided to hold one-off seminars with each of my classes about how to avoid plagiarism. This prompted a variety of reactions from my colleagues. Some responded with defensiveness, while others have suggested that I’m overreacting. A few other teachers have been largely supportive, expressing relief that there would be an explicit discussion with students. However, these colleagues have also warned me that there is little I can really do, given how widespread the problem is.

Plagiarism isn’t my only concern regarding academic integrity. With the season of mock exams for GCSE and A-level students underway, many teachers have suggested I show my students the papers in advance and allow them the opportunity to prepare in class. There is clearly a culture of cheating in my school.

When it comes to plagiarism, my biggest worry is that it stems from students’ lack of understanding. If so, it is apparent that we – as educators – are falling short in our duty to support them in their learning. I love teaching, but it’s the challenge and joy that comes from feeling proud of my time in the classroom that has truly brought me happiness in my work. Being asked to lower my standards on this is, to me, the antithesis of what educators should be striving for.

Rather than being offered support and collaborative solutions for a difficult situation (and one that faces many teachers around the country), my only option seems to be choosing to accept and expect less of myself, and to stop valuing my students’ classroom experiences for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

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