Primary or secondary teachers- more respected?

Also I get the impression there's some really pathetic nitpicking from primary SLTs which puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on primary teachers - stuff like scrutinising how your tables are laid out or what your displays are like, which is really trivial and should be up to the teacher to decide.

I think the reason why this happens isn't necessarily because primary has more 'yes' people, but rather that there is a greater focus on whole school approaches than there is at secondary. Primary schools are constantly getting new whole school approaches thrown at them by the government and educational 'experts' and because they're quicker and easier to implement than in secondary schools, there's always a fear that Ofsted will be looking to see whether or not these approaches have been taken on board more immediately than with secondary schools.

At the moment, you'll struggle to find a primary school that doesn't have a working wall for English and Maths because everyone has been told how important these are to supporting progress. You also get a lot of 'the school down the road has laid out their classes Singapore-style with single desks and their SATs results went up, so this term we're going to give it a go in Year 5 and 6 and see how it works' whereas, at secondary, you're less likely to hear about how the Maths department at the more successful school down the road has laid out their classrooms.

Essentially, the primary system is a lot more conducive to changes and fuss than the secondary system and that's why there are more nonsensical changes and fuss.

Having to update the working wall really annoys me. The kids never look at it. Even when we encourage them to. It takes a lot of time to create something that is interesting and related to their work.

Tell me about it! Although mine have a set, somewhat lazy format: for English, it's always a ton of key/technical words and the main features of the genre we're learning about, accompanied by definitions/examples written by the children and then as many pictures as I need to cover up the gaps! For Maths, I have mini-whiteboards of some children's work to demonstrate the methods/concepts we're learning about, relevant vocabulary and then lots of mastery questions to cover up the gaps. I've found that the English one can be useful to them, but I always have to prompt them to look at it. The Maths one is just pointless, though, and therefore not as frequently updated.

I find that because key words are on the English board, some of our kids have started to cheat in their spelling tests. It is then really difficult to see who is actually progressing and who is not. We have had a few retests!