Despite an omnicompetent staff I try to remain personally useful at school. I’m getting too old to charge about, so I regularly position myself at lesson change on the middle landing of the block 4 stairs. Just after half term a small girl said to me ‘Don’t you get bored, standing there all day, Miss?’

Another day I was dispensing current affairs stuff for my year 13s to analyse when one of them spotted that document was recent. From last week, in fact. In a moment of head-clutching revelation he demanded ‘Do you read up-to-date stuff?’. As a theologian there’s always the risk that I won’t have truck with anything after Augustine of Hippo, but actually, yes, I do. And what’s more, matey, next lesson I’ve got something hot off the press from the Bishop of Sheffield (whose daughters I taught) which opens up the established church to good sense and justice on sexuality. We can all question how that might go.

I last wrote about questions in about 2014, I think. I was remarking on the tendency of posh people to interrogate one so that they can find common ground to pin you down upon. I’ve assumed this was so they can run a mile if you prove to be an unsuitable companion. This can’t have been the reasoning behind the palace questioning – so why do it? What kind of good manners pursues a question your guest has already answered, as if it wasn’t true?

We had ourselves a training session on questioning this week. It’s a basic teacherly skill, which, like so many, developed a sheen of rust over lockdown and needs buffing up. We looked at open questions ‘What do you think is the biggest factor in the climate emergency?’, closed questions ‘What is Hamlet doing in Act 4?’, hinge questions ‘So what were the advantages of the Black Death?’, multiple choice questions checking for misconceptions ‘Hands up for a, b, c or d.’ and cold-calling questions ‘Derek, what is the area of this irregular polygon?’. We practised them on each other and undertook to do it better.

I love that stuff. Give me a roomful of people and questions from the floor and there’s no reason why I should ever stop talking, but I’m not so loquacious when the clipboarders shin up the rope ladders. Those are questions to be answered precisely and economically with a pleasant smile and fingers crossed for no devious follow-up. 

That’s because questions usually have a power dimension, where the searcher after knowledge and the broker of knowledge have a different roles. Refusing to answer a question can be awkward. Teachers might do it if the they’re faced with a vexatious interlocutor who just wants to avoid tackling the paragraph or is keen to amuse the hordes with impertinence. Anyone might do it if they don’t know the answer: ‘I’ll find out. Leave it with me’ is also part of the teacher’s armoury. But what happens if the questioner just goes on? What happens when you feel uncomfortable, got-at and doubt their motives?

Nick Cave answers questions in The Red Hand Files from time to time. This month he talked about good faith conversations.

This is worth knowing. Inquisitiveness is good, one of our Tallis Habits. We want our young people to wonder, explore, investigate and challenge. We want them to ask, speculate and examine. We want them to do it to understand the world and change it for the better, and we want them to do it kindly, and respectfully.  

I’m starting to write this before the Autumn Statement, as we may not be able to afford to type afterwards.

A month or so ago I berthed alongside one of the movers and shakers of the pre-Coalition education world. We lamented the present and made helpful suggestions for the future. Unfortunately, none of the recent Secretaries of State for Education were within earshot, but the retro-Scandi décor very much appreciated our wisdom, I felt. At one point he asked ‘Do your teachers call each other Sir and Miss’? I knew what he was driving at.
 
We weren’t talking about the semi-formal way a pair of teachers might refer to one another while talking to children – as in ‘Sir told you not to reproduce the Rokeby Venus on the corridor wall, didn’t he?’ to which Sir might respond, in serious tones, ‘Indeed I did, Miss, and I checked he understood that Spanish Golden Age is next term, not this.’ I’m talking about conversations without children, but where the child-facing persona seeps into ordinary professional conversations. ‘Did you bring the year 11 predictions, Ms, and what are you going to do about them?’ ‘I did, Sir, and have many innovative plans’.

It's quicker than names, of course. School life is brisk and I can see that Mr Fotherington-Thomas talking to Ms Potter-Pirbright might take up more time than anyone has left, but they could be Clive and Gert behind closed doors without frightening the horses. What my interlocutor sought was further evidence of the creeping infantilisation of teachers. He had a hunch that leaders insist on teachers calling each other Sir and Miss as part of a focus on ‘professionalism’ which is anything but.

I wrote a piece for the trade press last week in which I discussed this in a slightly less abstruse way. I won’t rehearse it here, but it was about government support for a particular brand of online learning, whether that meant that online learning was being proposed as a solution to the crippling national teacher shortage, and whether that meant that teachers as a species of skilled scholars with a deep intellectual hinterland is further endangered. Will cheap and easy solutions lead to cheapened education planning? Autumn statement notwithstanding, the answer mustn’t be yes.

Anyway, as the gods of Blackheath Hill decreed that my driving needed attention, I found myself on a Speed Awareness Course. I must say that it was excellent, especially when the facilitator led the ten of us to a point of action-planning our new lives as safer drivers. He didn’t quite call it that, but he forced (enabled) us to tackle our habits thuswise:

1. This is the problem…..
2. It might be caused by….
3. I could fix it by…..
4. Why might that not work?.....
5. To help my plan I will…..

 
Isn’t that fabulously clear? Google offers me a 46-page guide to action planning that the NHS uses, even my own goes on a bit, but any decent plan covers the same ground. So, if we apply this to the matter in hand:

1. The problem is that we don’t have enough teachers
2. This might be caused by low salaries compared to other postgraduate professionals and an unreasonable expectation to solve all the nation’s ills all day every day
3. We could fix it by funding education better so that we train teachers properly and give Clive and Gertie time to think and refresh their training, as professionals do
4. Why might that not work? Because we hold children in little value in the UK. We refuse to fund the education system properly so everything we do, we do cheaply. This treats Sir and Miss like children or expendable units, so they leave.
5. To help the plan we should fund the education system in a way that treats teachers as part of the solution rather than the problem, attracts and retains high-quality teachers, supports and develops our young people and builds up the nation’s life. My shaker and I don’t think this is unreasonable.

 
I note as I finish that, according to the BBC, J Hunt has pledged £2.3bn, for education. I’m not sure that’s a big number and I don’t know how much of it has already been announced or promised. More on this next time.
 
Hunt’s done whatever he’s done as part of a government running a country in what Gramsci called a state of catastrophic equilibrium, where everything is simultaneously failing and stable, where things can’t carry on but nevertheless must, year after year. That’s where we are in schools. He needs to have done enough to tip the balance back towards equilibrium from collapse, but it needs more than that to educate a people, to save the future.
 
CR
17.11.22

So, the report recommends:

1. The Prime Minister recognises the national threat to prosperity and security by the scourge of serious violence, criminal exploitation, and harm and convenes regular COBRA meetings to tackle the root causes of these problems. The Children’s Minister of State should attend Cabinet.
2. The Department of Education returns to its previous incarnation of Children, Schools, and Families, reflecting the central importance of thriving children and families as part of delivering a world class education system.
3. The Government establishes a new Sure Start Plus Programme, a “Sure Start for Teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face and encourages them to thrive. ‘We have chosen to incorporate the name Sure Start as it is a well-recognised and well-respected programme, which we believe was a mistake to dismantle.’ [Not half, say I]
4. The Government sets a target of 1,000 Sure Start Plus Hubs by 2027 to co-ordinate and deliver health and education support for vulnerable teenagers. Established in and around schools, the hubs will be run by charities, public bodies, business, and philanthropy organisations.
5. A new drive across Government to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, including the re-establishment of a Child Poverty Unit in Whitehall.
6. The Government leads a national mission to identify and remove racial bias in the systems that are currently failing many Black, Brown and Minority Ethnic children.
7. The Government takes a new “Family First” approach that supports families with children at risk of becoming involved with gangs, serious violence, or criminal exploitation and which prevents crisis, financed through the implementation of Children’s Social Care reforms, and delivered by local authorities and family organisations.
8. Reform of the children’s social care system to provide high quality care for all teenagers, taking an invest-to-save approach and delivered by a partnership of Government, local authorities and the third sector. Implementation of the Independent Review into Children’s Social Care recommendations delivered at pace.
9. The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community, financed by funds from the proceeds of crime and administered by a collaboration of national charities.
10. Opening all secondary school buildings before and after school, at weekends and during holidays, to provide safe and appealing places for teenagers, financed by funds from dormant bank accounts and National Lottery community funding.
11. The Government to promote a new era of inclusive education, ending the culture of exclusion and helping all children to succeed in their education.
12. One-off £1bn children and young people’s mental health recovery programme, part-financed by a levy on social media companies and mobile phone providers.
13. Reform the youth justice system to accelerate moves towards a fully welfare based, trauma-informed Child First approach.

 
To my mind, these proposals are absolutely excellent and should be enacted at once. Youth work is always the first to go under revisionist government, and we’ve had 12 years without it now. The Cabinet’s not short of what we now coyly call ‘high net worth individuals’. Perhaps they could prime the philanthropy for 3 and 4?

Back on the train, I was heading for Cambridgeshire and reading fast. I thought of another vision for education, that of Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges from the 1920s onwards. He determined that everyone, no matter how poor, should have access to good education in an inspiring setting. The village colleges were secondary schools and community facilities at the same time, focal points in villages where people of all ages came to learn, mix, be entertained and even get babies weighed. Henry Morris didn’t just create village colleges that were big schools – he created community education. Community education where everyone was in it together, where the whole village raised the children and support each other throughout their lives. When I was offering my skills in Leics in the eighties, their Community Colleges had the same vision.

So what have we now? Narrow education behind locked gates, for safety. Education at which many must fail to keep allegedly elite standards high while the country is run by the 7% who went to fee-paying schools and where a mere millionaire just isn’t trying hard enough. Where a known bully and incompetent can be promoted again and again, knighted for his services to the destruction of trust and integrity in public life: obviously a perfect person to be Secretary of State for Education at the time of the biggest increase in child poverty in modern times. I apologise for writing light-heartedly about such a one in blogs passim.

But finally, the advert. As I arranged my affairs, discovered I had only one contact lens and no charging plug for the Great Northern Electrostar making irregular terrifying banging noises upon which I travelled, I read the wall. There was a government poster about sexual harassment in the workplace, showing some concerned citizens saying what they would do to stop it. Good stuff, though not nearly as good as the Scottish That Guy campaign. But it was the sign-off that got me.

HM Government say ‘If you think it's wrong, act on it’. 

Tell that to Anne Longfield and the 200,000 terrified children, Rishi.
 
CR
10.11.22

Picture the concourse with its bridge running round it? There’s a jutting-out bit outside block two from which one might sing, survey troops or start a revolution. This never-before contested spot has been adopted at break and lunchtimes by a small group of year 7 girls who can barely see over the railing. They keep a close eye on everything and appear to have found a way to track my (random even to me) movements. Today I was fruitlessly searching for The Colleague With The Answer and these ladies apparated before me in two out of three blocks. I have high hopes for them. If you’ve read Anna Burns’ Milkman - and if not, why not? - they are the Wee Sisters. Intelligent, determined, resourceful, good-humoured and not to be underestimated.

Speaking of what you may not have read, among other journals my household takes the Church Times. My co-inmate, who may be reasonably expected to value this organ of the Church of England, curses it roundly and reliably every time it assaults the letterbox, demanding of the heavens why he is expected to read such drivel. Me, I like the cartoons, the minor gossip and reading just how badly church people can behave to one another when they forget themselves. One article this week looked at values having replaced religion in binding people together.  That’s fine when the values are such as equality, justice, accountability, kindness and honesty – but what if the values are self-referential, are about ‘living your best life’ or similar?

Watching the sorry spectacle of current parliamentary politics, it occurs to me that the former PM must have really wanted to be PM. Perhaps she thought she deserved it. Perhaps they all did, all the ministers and who’ve come and gone recently. Perhaps they wanted their hour on the stage, their soundbite moment. Perhaps refusing to talk to the OBR about policies already shared over champagne by the super-rich, or dreaming of planes to Rwanda, or bullying other adults in the lobby queue, or spouting crude tropes about the wokerati or taxis, North London and the BBC were so exciting, so life-enhancing that subsequent ignominy will be worth it? The tale of an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Most of us in the public sector would prefer a better résumé.

Two men present themselves to my mind’s eye. One is the former PM, at whose feet much of the blame for the collapse of behaviour in public office must lie. The second is the Secretary of State for Education, Kit Malthouse.  He chose to characterise school and college leaders as ‘hanging on to mediocrity’ and needing ‘constant attention and constant pressure’ to ‘drive it forward’. At least we know where he stands, but upon what evidence does he erect this calumny? I expect he believes that everyone outside the privileged bubble is necessarily mediocre and that all we need is a good shake so that we can be thrustingly excellent like…… Like who, exactly? Like the private schools whose results mysteriously dropped by 40% now that exams are back? Like Tory MPs?

If I wasn’t too mediocre to write a piece on values and virtues, I’d start with the hollowing-out of public life when assertion is the key performance indicator. That what enables the party of law and order to starve the police and the courts of money, the party of levelling-up to give tax relief to the super-rich. Twenty years ago we smarted under deliverance as a political mechanism, where measurement seemed to be more important than content, but that looks like responsible government now. At least politicians were trying to do something rather than just be someone.

And so we need to be really careful about how we teach children to be in schools. Innocent aspirational slogans like ‘Be the best you can be’ or irritating reminders to ‘Follow your dreams’ really won’t do. I’ve ranted at length about schools adopting canonical verse from If to Invictus and what that might mean for humanity, captain of my soul and all that. Self-actualisation is laudable as long as it is not at others’ expense. Our skills must be put to the public service and the common good. Kindness, fairness, honesty, respect and optimism are more important than trampling your neighbour because you‘re worth it.

We had 1525 people through the doors last night for post-16 open night. Everyone one of those young people had hopes and dreams. We’ll try to help as many we can get the qualifications that should open doors, if the vested interests of the elite don’t hold them shut, and if they can afford to eat while studying. Over the years, I’ve met young people who were entirely self-centred at the end of year 13, but they were my failures and they are few.  Most of them are fired with the passion to change the world for the better. Now my fear is that exhortations to do good and serve humanity look hopelessly old-fashioned. I tell children that they could be Prime Minister – but please, not like these people.

Ladies on the bridge, over to you.
 
CR
20.10.22

Travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon reported from a North Sea trawler to which he was poorly suited, being too tall and argumentative, and sick all the time. He described ‘six degrees of freedom’ at sea as pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw. I found that helpful when I was a young Head in stormy waters but I think we’re all feeling it nationally at the moment. Yaw now?

Heavy weather requires something to cling to so I’m returning to my moutons in the woolly shape of some principles I wrote 11 years ago. These have developed a edu-zeitgeist half-life as well as being inflicted on every group of people I’ve ever met. They are a sort-of answer to the perennial question of ‘what are schools for?’ and I wrote them at the time of the coalition government and to help make sense of Gove’s curriculum reforms. Here they are:

1. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself. Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
2. Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society.We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world.
3. Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities.We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
4. Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world.Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
5. Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life. It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
6. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens. As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
7. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy. Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
8. It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge. Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
9. Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission.The teacher’s authority to transmit or broker knowledge is given and valued by society
10. Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission. Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

 
At the time I was collaborating with Prof Michael Young of the Institute on a book that was published in 2014 and is still being read, called Knowledge and the Future School. Michael and I are chums, so he won’t mind me observing that he’s roughly 200 years old but nonetheless keeps thoughtful tabs on what schools are doing, and why. He’s concerned that schools leap from one two-dimensional solution to another without sufficient mental scrutiny, without thought and without reflection.

In 2011 it was important to conceptualise and reassert the primacy of knowledge in learning – but now we’re in danger again. Post-Covid, people are lurching towards off-the-peg curricula, like the Oak National Academy that sprang up to assist in desperate times but is now set to take over the thinking of a generation of teachers, a Japanese Knotweed of curriculum development. And perhaps schools can’t find space to see that or worry about it in the context of the unfunded pay award, the energy crisis, the fact that families can’t afford to eat and the missing of teacher recruitment targets in eight of the last nine years. By a mile. (Not that we’ll be able to measure anything in a future without maths or geography teachers.)

So what principles might we cling to in this particularly prolonged storm, with buckets of hail being thrown from each side and the siren call of off-the-peg answers sounding through the surge? Here’s my thinking so far:   

1. Knowledge is powerful: it can change the world, person by person.
2. Children need knowledge to interpret the world and broaden their possibilities.
3. Knowledge and understanding bring freedom and requires us to choose how to live
4. Knowledge is real but provisional: it endures and changes.
5. Knowledge gives people the power to think and act in new and better ways
6. Knowledge is social, produced in history: good communities are built on shared knowledge
7. Inequitable distribution of shared and powerful knowledge undermines democracy
8. Schools give unique access to knowledge, skilfully tailored to the growing human
9. Learners volunteer to acquire knowledge when enabled by skilled teachers
10. Good education is not inevitable.  It must not be withheld, misused or devalued.

​Comments welcome, of course.

I was watching a staircase last week and found a youth walking up it backwards, with one hand for the ship, the better to lecture his comrades. This caused significant embouteillage upstream so I issued a cease and desist. He apologised nicely, but I couldn’t tell if it was incipient demagoguery or a concern for safety that inspired him. 

When I visited the Capitol in 1999 the guides walked backward in front of us to prevent anyone slipping off to install Communism. It does feel as though we’re being led backwards at the moment, without reason or rationale.
Pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw are only good to look back on if you didn’t go under. Here’s hoping, for us all.
 
CR
31.9.22    

If you’ve ever corresponded with me you’ll see I have a long sign-off. This is v fashionable among Heads so I have to keep up. Among other things it tells you what I’m reading, that we are an Arts Mark Platinum school (huzzah!), that I’m a Fellow of the Chartered College and that we try to be ethical in all our dealings. It also says that I’m Co-Director of an outfit called the PTI, which stands for Professional Teaching Institute. You’re bored already, but bear with.

This PTI was set up by the former Prince of Wales twenty years ago and used to be called the Prince’s Teaching Institute. It was a school-led response to an increasing centralisation and prescription of what teachers taught and how, a reaction to concerns that children were only being drilled to pass exams and not being offered real, deep, interesting learning. It's never been a pressure group, but an organisation where teachers work with academics, public thinkers and other teachers to share their love of their subjects and find interesting ways of teaching them.  It's independent of government and funded by charitable donation, by philanthropists. The former Prince of Wales was enthusiastic to play a central part.

I got involved about 15 years ago and my last school was an enthusiastic consumer of the PTI’s courses. Tallis is too and we have a PTI Mark for four subject departments and for Leadership. Some of our subject leaders run sessions for other PTI teachers, and we get all of this, residential weekend conferences too in nice venues, for a very small contribution.  

PTI has a full-time Director and I was asked to become Co-Director in 2019: I’m just starting my fourth year. It means that PTI buy a bit under a day a week of my time from Tallis, for which they refund the school at the right rate. I advise them on what’s afoot in schools, and I can talk with donors and such. And that’s how I met the King, our Royal Patron.

When I say ‘met the King’, I mean I’ve met him four times. We’ve talked and he has expressed his concerns and views. He’s interested in schools and young people – as the long-term success of the excellent Prince’s Trust shows – and in what they can learn. The photo is of me being introduced to for the first time at a dinner (hence my extraordinary outfit).
​
So when the papers say that the King has a real interest in the education and wellbeing of all young people, I can tell you that’s true. I’ve heard it from the man himself. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll invite him to visit!
 
CR
14.9.22

Today’s the day when we get year 7 and year 12 into school. They’ve made a good start – quiet, cheerful and as efficient as young people get. Year 7’s bags are gleamingly clean, their turquoise polos shine in the sun and new shoes of all stiffnesses doing well so far.

We have over 400 year 12s and every one of them has agonised over their outfit so they’re a good-looking bunch. Why so many? Well, London results stayed high so lots of children met the entry requirements and we try to offer them places. Enrolment took all day and – first come, first served – caused some upset. We’ll think about another way of doing it but it's hard to see what’s fairest.

They can at least eat quickly. Year 7 do take their time with lunch: what with the choice, the explaining, the thumbprints and account top-ups. That’s OK today, but from tomorrow there’ll be 540 others in the same space for lunch desperate for food and familiar with the system. We’ll start year 7 early for a while so that they get fed while being gradually speeded up. One young chap in the queue today spotted a fire alarm point’s protective cover saying ‘LIFT HERE’. Being an orderly soul, he did and was promptly swooped upon in a neat pincher by two chaps offering advice. He may not do it again. A life lesson learned: not all instructions are for you. 

As I write, footballs and skipping ropes are being offered in a non-gendered manner and a request for a couple of big chess sets made. How big? Bring-your-own-horse big? Everyone’s telling me that year 7 look older and bigger than usual but I hadn’t spotted it. I start from a pretty low level in any case. Height-wise. It’s not that I have low standards about how tall eleven-year olds should be.

Oh, all right then, the new PM. Well – she’s worked up through local democracy, she was on Greenwich council, she lives locally and she went to a comprehensive school in Leeds. All these are positive. She’s not a public schoolboy and that certainly is. She went to Oxford from Roundhay School and yet said that it had low expectations? Hmm. I once had a conversation with a Deputy Head Girl in another school. She’d got top grades and one of the university hot tickets, but gave the school satisfactory grades for how they’d supported her. Frankly, they’d bent over backwards but I wasn’t worried: young people are naturally solipsistic. You just hope that hindsight develops a clearer picture over the years. Perhaps the new PM can’t unsay things. Is that a good thing?

Today’s speech did, however, stick a couple of things in my itchy old ears. Boris Johnson, she said, was admired from Kyiv to Carlisle. Rapturous applause was slightly delayed, perhaps because it had to be relayed from Kyiv at a time when they’ve other things to think about. Then she asserted that the Conservative Party is the greatest political party on earth, which they applauded more sharply. Really? Were they breathlessly awaiting the 1922 committee verdict across the continents and oceans of the planet? And even if it were, pulling back on climate crisis measures should dent that claim a little? Or is there greatness yet to unleash, unseen in my lifetime so far? Excellent news if so.

Ms Truss is my 13th PM, but that’s not her fault. Democracy is rooted in optimism so we always hope for the best.   That’s what I’ll tell the young when I’m let loose on assemblies next week: we do the best of things in the worst of times and hope in the face of adversity. That’ll be after I’ve told the staff to keep their fears about heating and food bills to themselves. Tallis will be warm enough, and the children fed every day. The safe boundary around school will be maintained and we will proceed calmly and reliably as the year goes by and the outside world buffets itself to bits.

Year 12 will be set loose upon the world in 2024, old enough to vote. The eleven-year olds in year 7 have only lived under one kind of government. The Financial Times predicts a change for the better coming soon. I hope they’re right.   

At the beginning of this auspicious Tallis 50 year I undertook to write a daily diary as a record. I expected to generate a pithy epigram or even a lasting aphorism that, taken collectively would sum up what a good big school is like, how the year goes and the seasons change. It would be a magnificent tone poem, a hymn of praise to the comprehensive school in all its glory. I would capture that ineffable ‘feel’ of a school, that thing that happens when you walk in and know what it’s like, within seconds, and want to run a mile or stay forever.

Anyone looking at the diary on the Tallis 50 site will know that I have signally failed in this task. It started off longer and vaguely elegantly worded but has now descended into a sort of gruff telegraphese which those in charge have had to hassle me to finish as I’d lost heart. The best I can hope is that it works in the future as a sort of record of what a school year’s like. The diary – as opposed to the year -  is actually not very interesting at all, while being absolutely fascinating in another dimension.

It’s a bit like asking a teenager ‘what did you do at school today?’ and being met with a grunt that means – this stretch of time was important to me. It’s been interesting in a way I’m still processing. You wouldn’t understand, and I’m not sure I do, yet. 

The diary was another attempt to encapsulate what good schools do. They breath, they sing, they hum over a sort of heartbeat of their own. They are reliable, solid, steady but also surprising, flexible and a bit unpredictable in the right way. The way other people measure schools is wrong, but the way we measure them is impossibly unpindownable, about character and ethos, yes, but about the feel.

Anyway. Final weeks of term are always showcases for character or characters. Teachers are hauling themselves to that finish line, other staff looking ahead to a tidier new year which, in real terms is minutes away. Children are irritable but vaguely excited.

The added gift this year has been the heatwave, a sure sign of the climate disaster to come, but also similar to the great three-week heat of ’76 when I was in the fourth year (year 10 in old money). I actually don’t remember much about it except a vague disappointment that it didn’t happen the following year when I had more time for it. This week’s heat was extraordinary, and we only had about half the children in school, due to what was, I think, inevitably poor quality government messaging. Our blessed building is large and mostly well ventilated, cool in some parts but too hot in others. For for the children there was enough shade and the chance to sit under a veranda, a tree, or indoors in the cool of the hall and talk.

I insisted on staying open for two reasons. First, because schools should be open. We must be completely reliable organisations, at the heart of society, calm and consistent especially for children who yearn to find that in adults.  Second because our big space, no matter how hot block 1 got, is cooler and airier than a crowded flat with no garden. Children deserve us when the going gets tough. And besides, end of year awards assemblies gotta happen.

So my thanks to the teachers who saw their colleagues in other schools sent home early, but struggled with our inconsistent air-handling and PFI response systems. My thanks to the premises staff on the ground who worked so hard to help us, and my thanks to the community who made a new memory together. No thanks to the Tory leadership candidates who’ll dump the green levy and sacrifice us all in their mendacious pursuits. My thanks to the architects of Tallis 50: we’ve had a great year. If you’d like a copy of our souvenir booklet do call into reception or email me. It’s an easy read. 

My thanks to everyone aboard HMS Tallis As the year ends and we enter harbour, especially to those who disembark for good this year. They’ve made their mark and we are better for their company on the voyage.
And my thanks to this remarkable school. Together, we have our imperfections. We’re necessarily fluid, experimental and messy, but our journey together is into the heart of education for the big world, that we need first to understand, and then change.

Auf wiedersehen. September will soon be upon us.

CR  
21.7.22

Monday I was talking to a group of arts educators at the Royal Opera House. I told them a few war stories and talked about the need for courage in school leadership, not to be blown about by conformity, government or exam board whims and exigencies, but to be principled and take the long view.

Actually, it was a wonder I spoke at all. While I was waiting to perform I took the radical step of checking my notes, a single page printout of nine slides. Upon reading, I was seized with panic that this was the day when I was finally exposed as having comprehensively lost it. Excellent individual points but joined up randomly, conveying no sense even to me. Struth, what to do? It was a 20-minute ‘provocation’ slot so I could potentially do it slide-less, but incoherent ramblings seemed unnecessarily provoking for an outfit paying Tallis for my services. Taking a last despairing breath I shook myself and looked again, just to discover that the printout was vertical but I’d been reading it horizontally like an idiot. It now made perfect sense. Revival of stout party.

I tell you this as it took me right back to being in exams at school, reading something that I thought I knew but actually didn’t recognise at all. It is absolutely terrifying, and I was filled with admiration for the fortitude of our young people walking calmly into so many exam rooms this last six long weeks rather than screaming in terror and fastening themselves to the banisters, which I very nearly did.

It was a joy, therefore, next morning at Tallis, to chance upon 5 questing chaps who introduced themselves as four astronomers and a Russian speaker in search of exams. I found the room, they thanked me gravely and unflappably and went to face their foe.

Back at the Opera House, I told them about visiting the RA Summer Exhibition last Saturday where himself and I engaged in pointless bickering in the shop afterwards. He concluded with a flourish, declaring ‘your trouble, Carolyn, is that you’re a conformist’. This stung, and despite many witty ripostes in the following week it repeats.

Thursday I found myself gladly introducing and welcoming five visiting academics to the inaugural Tallis Philosophy conference in partnership with the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I said that it was often frustrating to children to discover that what we teach them, especially in exam years, is partial and not the totality of human knowledge on a subject. What about all the other stuff they might be interested in? I found myself saying that schools are essentially conservative institutions and that’s why we need close links with the academy, to keep in touch with what’s new, to keep in touch with professional thinkers.

It's odd to be conservative, liberal and radical at the same time, but that’s what we try to be at Tallis. We fulfil the role of a school (a bit conservative) but we allow a lot of freedoms within that boundary (liberal) and we challenge outdated views as we try to change the world for the better (radical). You need your wits about you to manage all three. Getting your slides in order would be a start.

People are therefore kind enough to give me leadership books from time to time and I’ve been amusing myself by opening a volume on the transferable lessons of commanding a submarine, when I write the staff bulletin every week. This week was about ‘maintaining the tickler’. If you don’t mind me asking, how’s yours?

Returning to the arts, last year someone gave me a beautiful edition of Philip Larkin’s poems. Larkin has been quite in the news, having been excised from exam board OCR’s GCSE Eng Lit specification, so that the assigned poets might be more representative of global writing. The Secretary of State, among others, is furious about this, saying that Larkin was his gateway to poetry and that all children should read him, that to deny him was denying great art to students who might never get it otherwise.  
 
Hmmm. It is the gateway that’s the thing. Teachers always ask themselves: what do we want children to learn and to know? What do we want alongside them as they leave the room? All other arguments notwithstanding, what I want is for children to love poetry and to want to read it, to find within it an expression of their unspoken feelings, fears and worries, hopes and dreams. Therefore, it has to make sense to them at the time. It has to be readable and speak to their condition.

Larkin’s poetry will survive whether or not every sixteen-year-old is forced to read it and, crucially, more of them might seek him out as adults if they’ve been introduced to other poetry that seizes their souls when they’re in school. Teaching poetry at all might be seen as a conservative or radical act by some, but engaging with art in any form should never be about conformity.  We don’t all have to read the same verses, but the verses that open the doors to the child, at that time.  Enabling children to see something of themselves in the curriculum choices we make should help them, to make interesting choices for themselves as adults. We are laying the foundation to build a better world. Or, as the man says, in his first published poem, a different ship:

Well, Lord Geidt, quite the stir. Despite a mini-obsession with ethics, I hadn’t really clocked him until this week. I was still stuck on the resignation of the last one, Alexander Allen over Priti Patel’s bullying and didn’t realise the PM had got on with recruiting and destroying another one. He is a busy bee. This Geidt looks pretty tough on Google.  Perhaps he decided that life in Downing Street compared badly with Bosnia and other war zones of his military and diplomatic service, or with his years at The Palace, though I expect it can get pretty excitable there.

Tim Harford was writing about ethics, or more particularly about metacognition versus virtue in the FT last Saturday (don’t worry, this’ll get scrappier soon). Metacognition, teaching people how to think is next to impossible to define, so what about looking at what kind of people emerge from education? How have their temperaments and virtues benefitted from years of investment? Harford suggests love of truth, honesty about one’s failings, fair-mindedness, humility and a willingness to seek help, perseverance, courage, good listening, perspective-taking, empathy and wisdom make for better learners. Others added the ability to see connections and a sense of humour, humanity and getting-stuff-done-ness. Persuasiveness (hmmm). Curiosity. 

One of Harford’s correspondents objected, saying it wasn’t her place to teach students how to be good people. But if not, who?  He ends the piece, having admirably made not one reference to the PM, with ‘And if we don’t know who will teach those virtues or how to teach them, that explains a lot about the world in which we now live’.
You heard it here first. We‘re queasy about the language of virtue, and the churches don’t fill the space any more, so who teaches young people how to live a good life? Obviously: we do. Teachers and parents, schools. Unfortunately, the cheaply functionalist, any-means-necessary, measure-by-results, structure-not-quality mechanisms of our system drown the virtuous route: sustained endeavour, curiosity, substance, breadth, depth, kindness and selflessness.

Did the Times Education Commission report, published this week to deafening fanfares, dive into this, I hear you cry? Not so much. Their twelve-point, forty-five recommendation plan is interesting. There is much collusion with government policy hidden in the very small print, such as the outrageous ‘elite sixth forms’ cuckooed into disadvantaged areas, for example. Some of the narrative smacks of poverty tourism and paternalism such as ‘private schools understand all too well that there must be more to education than knowledge’. The ‘teachers are heroes’ damaging trope is given another run out – heroes don’t need paying properly, of course – as is the inevitable Birbalsingh. While any document using ‘superhead’ should be flung across the room, the commitment to broad, deep and memorable educational experiences appears to be real.  It would be churlish not to quote the first two recommendations, a 15-year strategy for education run by an independent body, and an end to three-year funding cycles. Oh yes.

The other report this week is from the Rethinking Assessment group, a coalition of educators trying to reframe the way we assess schooling and what children know. There’s much to be said for this. Perhaps the combination of the two might dislodge something?
 
What’s not included, in either, is a broad, deep or even memorable critique of our divided society, and the effects of cynicism, slovenliness and playing it for laughs in public life on our children. Both reports have a serious tone, but the Department is congenitally obsessed with structural reform, and the PM doesn’t seem to have time to care about anything other than continuing to be PM against the odds. I’m not holding my breath. 
 
But I write this at lunchtime on the hottest day of the year and, despite some rather coarse inter-student shouting I can hear through my open window, all are cheerful. We got through year 9 Sports Day with a gentle breeze before someone turned the gas up, and when I held the block 4 bridge door open for the hordes almost every single one of them said ‘thank you’ or asked me how I was.  One even blessed me from under a straw hat as she scuttled past determinedly. Three teacher trainees called in to say goodbye at the end of their placements, the GCSE Art moderator has been and gone and, fabulously, among the exams of the day have been Persian and Astronomy.  Wouldn’t it be great if Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar were among the candidates?

We had Tim Oates in school this week, talking about the long-term educational effects of the pandemic and the things we should focus on.  It was good to have him in in the flesh: we started the year thinking about his insights, in September.  And we’ll return to it this September, because in the end, these children in this place haven’t time to wait for the tanker to turn round, even if the order is sent down from the bridge. We have to look to our own skills in teaching and questioning, reading and really thinking hard about the concepts that unlock doors in children’s brains and make them yearn to find out more. We need to put our learning virtues to work. 

Good people, good learning, good classrooms, good schools. If the PM can’t find a replacement for Lord Geidt he doesn’t need to scrap the post. Lots of us could do it. At your service, matey.
 
CR
17.5.22 

Looking forward to half term? I’m not following my usual May path of getting onto a train somewhere hot straight after school, but going to West Wales and back for the Jubilee. Time’s running out for us older folks – not including the Queen, of course – and I may safely bank on not seeing another Platinum Jubilee. It seemed churlish not to return to London to potter about in the crowds.
 
I like to do a bit of shopping on my hols, between books. Even a different supermarket is interesting to me and I’m a sucker for everything from weaving in the wilds to the magnificent pharmacies of France. 
 
We’ve been having two different kinds of trouble with shopping here. The first is linked to two large shops of the modern type which opened opposite us but don’t really want children’s custom. I get that hordes of youths hell-bent on unhealthy snackage deters other shoppers who may have more cash. I know that handling teenagers isn’t to everyone’s taste and fear arouses anger which generates trouble, especially when highly caffeinated comestibles are in the case, but it's not as if the existence of the school was hidden to the planners. We are big enough to see.
 
Similar happened in my last school, with a magnet sixth form like Tallis, but gathering also from semi-rural areas. Young drivers couldn’t park in the car park but could in the local streets. This drove residents crazy. Yes, they needed practice parking tidily, but didn’t we all? Young citizens with full licences and insured cars also have parking rights. Responsible young shoppers, some picking up a few things for the family on the way home, could be allowed to go to the shops everyone else goes to, with a bit of planning. We’re working on it.
 
The second shopping trouble isn’t actually about the shopping. Our local parade, as local readers know, can be a troubled spot, so we operate a post-school curfew. From time to time, working with the police, we ban everyone for a day or two. This infuriates lots of people, but keeps our children safer for a while. Supervising the streets, however, is hard, and one of the things that would help is good CCTV. Some adults have strong feelings about being filmed: I have strong feelings about keeping children safe. We could work together on this.
 
Anyway, returning to the shopping, I am delighted to update you on Lord Agnew and his champagne. From Schools Week:

Which, monarchist or no, you have to admit has a better tone than either WTF, taxpayers or sorry we upset people, didn’t realise it was banned, didn’t know it was a party. Could we all perhaps try a little devotion to service?
 
There’s a Tallis English challenge for over the hols that invites age-appropriate use of 18 words. I’ve inaccurately divided them into two groups. For your Jubilee homework, which best fits the Queen and which best fits the government? Give reasons, 19 marks.
​

1. Gumption, humungous, iconic, lucid, esoteric, Zeitgeist
2. Kerfuffle, quaver, cantankerous, miffed, obsequious, discombobulate, defunct, collywobbles, capricious, ennui, idiosyncratic, ubiquitous, Zeitgeist

 
Jubilees in the ancient world started with a blast on the shofar. Find me a ram.
 
CR
27.5.22

On the day when ninety-one thousand civil service jobs were declared superfluous and a Russian tank battalion sank in the Sivertsy Donets we had our leavers’ assemblies. Shirt-signing in the yard and a big group photo, then into the hall. Frankly, I’d expected better weather. Some have been wearing sunhats for weeks, entirely unnecessarily. Anyway, the vibe was happy and this year’s fashion included shirts with golden names stuck on the back and some seemingly bespoke for the purpose of signing.

It's not the first time we’ve ever done these assemblies, but the echoes of Covid ring loud and long. While I was listening to the end of Ms taking leave of her year group, I was transported back two years, to a hastily-cobbled-together assembly in March 2020 to say goodbye to year 11 because lockdown was beginning and school was closing, suddenly. I felt quite queasy. 

The day itself isn’t like leavers’ days of old. We don’t do lengthy study leave any more and this one was put in to mark the transition from the ordinary timetable to the exam prep sessions adjacent to the big days. The very do itself today abutted the first external exam just after lunchtime. Timing was key but the gods of Friday 13th will have their fun and we had a total AV and IT collapse at the very assembly when slideshows and photomontages with emotional soundtracks are de rigeur. Doughty Ms and her team had to busk while technicians of all kinds clustered around and eventually a trolley, like a mobile ICU, was rushed in. The careful dovetailing - getting Year 11 out so Year 13 can get in – all went to pot. I intervened and moved the boundaries. Everyone was supportive. Children of all ages and sizes had a lovely time. See you on Monday, exams are upon us.

Today, their tutors praised them and reminisced publicly. Some sang, some rapped, all gave awards – for character, and Goats. Goats were new to me as I don’t mix with sporting types, but it pleases me as an acronym and it worked for the tutors. Greatest Of All Time at….arguing, football, falling off chairs, organising, saying hello to everyone, looking after new people, keeping the peace, being tannoyed for, speaking the truth without fear or favour, looking good…. while Sir and Ms blinked back the tears.

These young people have had such a rocky time. We were interviewed by the BBC for a piece to go out on Monday about the return of exams, so I had seven in the Sports Hall yesterday pretending to sit at exam desks (‘Quick! No! Get tidier ones out!’). They all spoke urbanely and calmly about their preparation and how they’re feeling. Ready, but anxious. Who knew? The Beeb may have wanted something more hysterical, but we’re too cool for that. As the soundtrack to one of the slideshows today said:

I am indebted in this blog to Paul Muldoon’s volume of poetry of the same title, and, in particular, his 1916: the Eoghan Rua Variations. In it, he discusses the contrary nature of the longevity of English power in Ireland. Caesar and Alexander fell, so why not the English? Well worth a read.
Faber London 2019 ISBN 978-0-571-35499-8.
​

Some people are a pundit’s gift. Social Mobility Chair Katherine Birbalsingh is a worthy successor to  Lord Agnew and Gavin Williamson in these Pulitzer-worthy pieces. You’ll recall that I heard her say (to a thousand school leaders) that she didn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission was doing? This week she’s said that she has no idea how DfE White Paper GCSE targets can be met, and that fewer girls choose physics because “physics isn’t something that girls tend to fancy……they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think they would rather not do.” This she backs up fully with detailed evidence: “The research generally … just says that’s a natural thing….I don’t think there’s anything external.” Surely her days are numbered?
 
As the Grauniad said, this prompted anger from leading scientists.
 
‘Dame Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics and master of Churchill College, Cambridge, said the comments were “terrifying” and “quite damaging” and questioned to which research Birbalsingh was referring in suggesting that girls had an intrinsic lack of appetite for maths and physics.
 
Dr Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who campaigns for equality in science, said: “I honestly can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. It’s patronising, it’s infuriating, and it’s closing doors to exciting careers in physics and engineering for generations of young women. Whilst girls and boys currently choose A-level subjects differently, there is absolutely no evidence to show intrinsic differences in their abilities or preference.”
 
Rachel Youngman, the deputy chief executive of the Institute of Physics, said: “The IOP is very concerned at the continued use of outdated stereotypes as we firmly believe physics is for everyone regardless of their background or gender.”
 
Surely the inevitable will eventually take its course? Surely she’ll eventually be moving along?
 
Sadly, as with the PM, no one is surprised. KB was the Deputy Head who sank her own school at the Conservative Party Conference in 2011. Four years later she set up a Free School and now calls herself the strictest headmistress in the country, as if that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. Invited to reflect on the scalability of her model, she says – all schools should be like mine, look at the quality of the artwork. (This echoes her 2011 claim that children in state schools didn’t read whole books, in comparison to fee-paying children who might read four or six a year). What? I saw the artwork, which was nice, but lots of us have remarkable teachers eliciting fabulous stuff. Many of our students would think four to six books a year pretty thin stuff. Her pronouncements are often met with well-raised eyebrows. Surely one day she’ll have to give up?
 
I wonder. We have a DfE which appears to be better led in the ‘I want this: Ofsted will inspect it and I’ll name and shame those who aren’t managing it’ style. Around, above and below sit all kinds of Tsars and Tsarinas, favourite MATs and pseudo-research. KB is, to the current government, a very attractive figurehead for the not-very Tory endeavour of social mobility, her media-savvy performances a wonderful distraction from the job in hand. Just like the PM.
 
And yet why say that about girls? KB’s school-based pronouncements about the need for total control and discipline are all about clearing a space for potentially disadvantaged students to not-fail. Because they aren’t given any choice, they are freed to achieve. It is an argument, certainly. So why doesn’t it work for girls doing physics? Shouldn’t the same lie in store for girls with no family history or university or science thinking about storming that citadel? As Mandela said, freedom is indivisible. You can’t raise the economically disadvantaged while oppressing those disadvantaged by gender. Why would you?
 
Part of me wonders, flying in the face of the political zeitgeist, if this latest set of gaffes might dislodge her from favour. Perhaps the cup might pass to someone else’s more reliable lips? Perhaps she’ll get what’s coming to her? Then I look hard at the evidence before me and the sorry context in which we’re in and give myself a shake.  Personal integrity is less important than a snappy soundbite: blame and distancing are more worthwhile than trying to solve an intractable problem; sounding iconoclastic is all that matters. Brexit happened thus, and we sink under its weight.
 
Clever people don’t make accidental gaffes. The PM has never said anything he didn’t mean to say, whether he meant it or not. Oxford-graduate KB may or may not care about girls in physics, but she cares hugely about herself, her profile and her future. Raising the numbers of girls in A level physics and Further Maths has been a long and painful journey for all thinking schools. I wonder if she knows this, has tried her best and not-quite succeeded?  She’s had all the plaudits for so long that perhaps she can’t risk-assess admitting failure. 
​

School should include memorable experiences so as a new Deputy Head in 1997 I got very excited about the chance to book one. For a brisk fee, a helicopter would land and take off on the school field a couple of times, children could be invited to look at it and have some talks about how it worked. I reckoned the PTA would shell out for this brilliant idea so I rushed to the Head for the rubber stamp. He looked like a man who regretted a brave appointment. ‘Are you mad? Of course not.  We’d get nothing done all day.’ But as his successor was wont to say, revenge is a dish best enjoyed cold, and it only took me 25 years to eat it.

Friday last, I’d been in in since crack of dawn catching up with myself and all was going nicely. At about 0825 the word went out that there’d been an incident in the street and would we mind clearing away the hundreds of nosey teenagers who were potentially impeding the emergency services? Colleagues helpfully rushed forth and sheepdogged the masses through the gates. So far so good, but the sound of helicopter rotors was growing, like one of those modern war films where everything’s falling apart and out of the sky. This does not calm: children were jumping up and down with excitement.

Concerned about a frankly poor start to the day, I gathered self and Acme Thunderer, instructed my long-suffering PA to ‘tell everyone to get their kids in’ and scuttled out. Block 5’s staircases go around the long way so all hell had actually broken loose by the time I gained the concourse. The children, happy to have been ushered off the public highway, entered Fortress Tallis only to find that the bright red Air Ambulance had obligingly landed just south of our memorial garden for their better inspection. The noise was deafening, whistles completely useless.  Miraculously, adults summoned by my peremptory instruction managed to get in front of the crowd thus preventing the foolish from getting in the way of the landing skids (a new technical term).

I was a seething ball of outrage by then and with a cry of ‘who said they could land a helicopter here?’ stomped towards the offending machine, which was turning itself off. The pilot, obviously experienced with het-up local despots, took the wind out of my sails by apologising so charmingly that within seconds I had offered him free landing rights for life from the football area to the basketball courts, an escort in and out of the gates and a cup of tea if he liked. Everyone went in and the machine had picked itself up and gone within 10 minutes.

By then, of course, it was all over social media that the air ambulance had had to be called because of something at school, so I spent a bit of time calming folks. Yes, it had landed. Yes, there was a life-changing injury. No, it was not at school. No, it didn’t involve any children. For us, it was over by lesson 2. For the family involved, not so. As I said in a swift email to parents: seeing the helicopter had been fascinating for the children but tragedy lay behind it. We were glad to be of service (once I’d got over myself, I didn’t add).  

I’d hoped for calm on Friday because we had enough excitement, which, as Mr Dunford knew needs to be doled out carefully in school lest things become inflamed. It was Earth Day, so we had visitors and gardening, including a chance for year 9 to mingle with leaf blowers and lawnmowers round in the other garden. 

It was also Stephen Lawrence Day so we had one of our moments of solidarity planned, with a gathering on the concourse, in memory and to hope for better.

We’ve done a few of these now, it’s becoming quite a feature of Tallis life. We’ve got better at the practicalities. The speaker had rehearsed well and I kept my nose out of the amplification – except to pull the plug on a nice little band playing as the community started to come out. You don’t have to be zero-tolerance to know that there’s a better chance of getting silence quickly without shouting if there’s no other noise. The heli had given us quite enough of that. They played to a rapt audience afterwards, when no one needed to be quiet.

Our speaker was Harry Marcus from 10RA, from his heart and his mum came to hear him. He talked about the Lawrence family first, and then his own:

This blog has been written largely by others. The first two stories are courtesy of that organ of truth, Schools Week, all power to their shorthand notebooks. The third was heard by my own ears at a very large conference in Birmingham on Saturday March 12 2022.

The fourth is in the form of a response written by a year 10 Tallis student. I don’t need to repeat the brutality of that story.

News Story 1: ‘Elite Sixth Forms’
Eton and a group of successful academies called the Star Academy trust intend to bid in the next wave of free schools to open ‘elite’ sixth forms in Dudley, Middlesbrough and Oldham in 2025. They will provide “knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists; access to talks, academic essay prizes and debate clubs; Oxbridge-style tutorial sessions and the chance to learn Latin”. They will also be subsidised to the happy tune of £4000 PER STUDENT on top of the funding we all get.

I’d like to set a few essay questions on this topic, if I may? 20 marks a pop.

1. If Eton need £4k more per child to do a good job, what are the rest of us supposed to do with just the taxpayer’s shilling? 
2. What is the alternative to ‘knowledge-rich teaching from subject-specialists’ and, for the love of Mike, what do they think the rest of us are doing?
3. What are extant local sixth form providers meant to do when their results plummet because the elite have lured a particular group into their gold-plated lairs?
4. What would happen if all 6F providers in the poorest areas got an extra £4k pp?
5. Why perpetuate the language of elites and Eton-gets-you-into-Oxford?  What is preventing Gasworks Comp form getting children into Cambridge who are suited to that kind of education? (The answer may be in the question.)

News Story 2: Lord Agnew’s champagne.
‘Agnew famously said in 2018 he would bet any headteacher “a bottle of champagne and a letter of commendation” his advisers could find savings in their schools – and likened himself to “a pig hunting truffles” in his pursuit of efficiencies. [but] …… cost-cutters failed to identify savings at more than one in ten schools they visited, new figures show….When asked if Agnew had in fact sent those schools a bottle of champagne, the DfE reiterated, “opportunities were identified in these cases but they were not costed or reported.”’

1. Discuss Agnew’s working hypothesis that all HTs mismanage budgets.
2. Locate the missing champagne.
3. Will Roberts have to stop writing about this now?

 
News Story 3: The Chair of the Social Mobility Commission doesn’t know what the Social Mobility Commission plans to do.

1. Why not?
2. Who does?

 
But the fourth news story cannot be treated lightly.
 
Today at Tallis we held an act of solidarity for Child Q. This is the speech that a 15-year-old girl wrote and read to our community, at break.  
 
In North-East London, a 15 year old black girl went into her school to take a mock exam. Her parents put their trust in the school to keep her safe but instead... they accused her of being in possession of drugs. They searched her. Called the police and allowed her to be strip searched without her parent’s knowledge or consent. 

This happened because black children are often not seen as innocent. And not even seen as children.

No one should EVER have to experience such harmful actions caused by racial bias. 

The safety of children and education are basic rights. Fairness shouldn’t have to be fought for. No matter the race, gender, class, abilities, or beliefs of anyone. Dignity is for all. It isn’t fair that we aren’t the first generation to fight for our human rights. But we can strive to ensure that we will be the last. 

So what are we doing to change this? If we are being persecuted in our youth and we do nothing about it, then are we any better than the persecutors? What happened to integrity?

Martin Luther King's dream is still only a dream but we can make that OUR reality. We stand for equity, for it is a necessity no matter identity. I want to live in a world where everyone feels safe around the police and not fear an abuse of their power. Where adults advocate for children. Where anyone can excel.  For that to stop happening we have to remove these stereotypes from the media, from our curriculum, from what we say, the way we treat certain groups or certain people and even the jokes we make. Small things can make such a big difference once we apply them to everyday life.

We can all make a change now. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a major change. We can be an ally. We can demonstrate solidarity with Child Q. Napoleon Hill once said...“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way”. 
Stand in solidarity with Child Q and respond to our call of ‘we deserve better: we can do better’.

And so we did.

I’ve seen a couple of children wearing splendid origami crowns this week. I’d like to give every child one, to demonstrate that we respect them, protect them, take them seriously and try to build a better world for them. 

The composite news story of the week has been of division, arrogance, indolence, brutality and a blinkered refusal to see the big picture we are all painting for young people. We are a very long way from changing the world for the better. I don’t have any more words for this.
 
CR 25.3.22

Dear Sir Gavin,
What a flap your knighthood caused! I was at a Heads’ Conference just after it landed and really, we could hardly concentrate on budgets, absence, exams, staffing, budgets, racism, teacher shortages, budgets, sexual violence, climate emergency, budgets and political impartiality when we had your good news to discuss. When I got back, I opened Brighouse and Waters’ new 640-page About Our Schools for solace and launched into Danny Dorling’s preface. I wonder if his first line: ‘we often don’t truly value something until we’ve lost it’ was about you? 

I don’t know if you saw it, Sir, but sadly, political impartiality prevents me from reporting the reaction of the shadow education secretary. I can tell you that Mr Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said head teachers and parents would be surprised to learn the news. He admitted that the pandemic would have been challenging for any education secretary but, a teacher himself, couldn’t help but observe that your tenure had been one of endless muddle and inevitable U-turns. Gosh. Me, I just don’t think we ever grasped the master plan. Am I right?

You could have helped us, though, so I expect you’ll welcome two suggestions. They’re both from our latest Teaching and Learning Newsletter which, though we say it ourselves, is pretty sharp. 

The first is about using metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies by modelling your thought processes out loud. That’s when teachers explain their thinking when interpreting a text or solving a mathematical task or whatever.  The best ones can simultaneously explain how it relates to bigger objectives and suchlike. You could have tried that?

The second is about producing beautiful work, as I’m sure you were frustrated by the quality of some of your outputs. It can happen to any of us, and I know I would have been. Mary Myatt, for example, talks about eliciting and celebrating work that is original, that represents the fruits of considerable labour and which is worth keeping.
She describes it as a ‘worthwhile endeavour not just for pupils, but for adults as well. It shifts the landscape, it raises the game and it means that we have to continually ask, is this the best it can be? It’s a question worth asking: What do standards actually look like when met with integrity, depth, and imagination?’ Great questions. I wonder if you might have time to reflect on them, from the back benches, or do the fireplaces’ siren calls lure you out of public service? Ah well.

Worse things than old Barton’s opprobrium happen at sea, as I’m sure you discovered, Sir G, when you were in Defence. I was musing on this these with a trainee teacher of my acquaintance, not at this school. She described a (to her) nightmare experience with year 9s which sounded OK to me for someone of her inexperience. It could have been worse, I consoled. How? How? she goggled. Well, she could have had a wasp in the room. Hymenoptera care nothing for a sassy lesson plan. Speaking of, I was nearly flattened by two enormous year 10 girls this very morning, leaping into each other’s arms to avoid ‘a really big bee’, so I know about being blown off course
However, the new tack brought me face to face with a larger youth surreptitiously blowing into a prototype water bomb-balloon affair. We dealt with that silently. I frowned, he raised an eyebrow to demonstrate he’d considered fronting it out, but I won and it went in the bin. Perhaps silence could have been a strategy for you, Sir? Less retrofitting strategy required? It can be tiring.

Indoors – it was a bit parky to stay out - I perused the breaktime hordes in the canteen. They were doing their muttering and eating thing, some reading books, others bickering, some sharing phones, some with the bacon or sausage sandwich fare that so tantalises the tastebuds at 11:00 here in SE3. Others were extracting snacks from pockets, bags, marmalade sandwiches from under hats and suchlike.

After that, mock exam-gathering at one end of the canteen while year 7 and 8 took their turn to gather at the south end to be ushered reluctantly into a singing workshop. They really didn’t want to do it, but the leader was compelling and lured them in. It's lovely to hear children in unison and even better, given the last year or so, to watch them too, laughing and gesturing despite themselves keen to respond to the big character stomping in the big boots and making them SING. One head of year stayed for two hours.

Would a song help, Sir Gavin? Gavin is derivative of the Old English Gawain, of the Green Knight fame. His quest was also tricky, if I may quote the Armitage translation?

In a strange region he scales steep slopes;
far from his friends he cuts a lonely figure.
Where he bridges a brook or wades through a waterway
ill fortune brings him face to face with a foe
so foul or fierce he is bound to use force.
So momentous are his travels among the mountains
to tell just a tenth would be a tall order.

It must have all been very tricky. How we do feel for you. If only you could have been rewarded somehow, for everything you must have wanted to do.

But what am I like? I nearly forgot where we started: you were given a knighthood!

​Did you miss my letters, Sir Gavin? Send me your new address: I’m happy to oblige.
 
CR
9.3.22
 
 
 

Oh give me a break. Buffeted by Cornish winds, I’m warned to be politically impartial and then there’s a war. Given that all sides of the House agree that this is a result of unprecedented aggression etc, am I allowed to talk about peace? What is balance, this week? Do I just teach one side? Please don’t answer. I’m sure it’ll get us into trouble somehow.

When the western political situation took a turn for the worse with the previous inhabitant of the White House and depressing shenanigans this side of the pond, I decamped from Radio 4 to 3 avoid it all. This time, I’m taking refuge in the Thinking with Pinker podcasts, a short course in cogitational improvement. One episode is called ‘You Can’t Say That’ and it’s on ‘taboos, heresies and counterfactuals’. I’m swum in the seas of religion all my life so I know a bit about these. I like to think that makes me reasonably sharp at spotting myth, sentiment, falsehood and claims of destiny. Before you get cross, Pinker isn’t talking about the language of racism and misogyny: rudeness and oppression are always wrong. He’s talking about the ruts of acceptable thought in which we stick ourselves.

We love this in education. We’re counterintuitively keen on confining thought and easily attached to totems. Exams, for instance. Rather than looking at the current circumstance as a chance radically to reform the whole outlandish structure, we’re swimming frantically back through the shark-infested waters of memory testing and cheap proxies to replant our flag in the Land of the Forgotten Third. And we delude ourselves and yes, I have an example, a sub-heading on the BBC Family and Education page asking ‘How will my exams be different this year?’.
This makes no sense. For a start, a child wouldn’t ask it. Barely a one sitting public examination this year will have ever taken one before. Year 13 didn’t do GCSEs. They have no idea what’s different, or similar. The question actually being asked, by anxious adults, is ‘are exams children take this year worth anything to the elitist calibration mindset we’re trapped in?’. If it was a child asking, the question would be ‘What’s happening and what do I need to do? Will I need a pen?’

I’m not opposed to exams. It's reasonable to measure learning, not least to assess current aptitude for choices at 18. It’s also perfectly legitimate for the state to want to measure its system. But we could do so much better. My counterfactual would run: ‘If we already knew that exams were a flawed way of measuring children’s learning, we would have seized the opportunity of the pandemic to ……’ Why can’t we think about that? If not now, when?

Children, however, can turn their minds to other things. Wandering about to spy on the choices Deputy Head candidates made at break I chanced upon the conversion of a bench seat to a table tennis table, requiring the game to be played inelegantly at the stoop, then the peer-review of an engineering prototype. This latter was a small boy whose friend claimed he’d made a device to extract apple juice from apples. I thought it needed further development, myself. Squeezing the air out of one of those tiny soy sauce bottles and trying to jam it into the side of a Gala didn’t appear to be extracting a marketable product, and at least one of the potential investors thought it was disgusting, but a refined model may have legs? Or show signs of being remotely able to work.
 
Year 8 have been thinking about what they can do to help children in Ukraine. They settled on a sort-of sponsored walk (steps in tutor time) for War Child. This seems like a sensible way of expressing concern and fits with one of our repeated sayings, on every Christmas Card since 2014, Eglantyne Jebb’s ‘all wars are wars against children.'

Good for them. Meanwhile, in peace time, we were trying desperately to track down some Food Bank vouchers.   
But by the time you read this we’ll have appointed a new Deputy Head and that’s always exciting. Deputies forecast, control and make the weather in school and good ones are beyond rubies. Lots of people have been involved: students, teachers, classes, year groups, support staff and governors over a two-day grilling process. I did this twenty-five years ago. I didn’t get the first one I applied for, largely because I couldn’t express a thought about the curriculum. I got the second one and it changed my family’s life. It’s a great job in the right school.

I have put some time into thinking about the curriculum since then, despite national lurching from one set of ossified prescriptions to another ever since. We think a lot at Tallis, and we try to teach the children that an unexamined life is perhaps less rewarding than one where you create informed choices. As a colleague said at the end of term, we try to link our epistemology to our ethos here, which is great if you can remember what epistemology means. As we say to the children – we know we’re learning when we’re thinking very hard – but within the bounds of kindness and respect, the blessed exam specifications and the impartiality rules, we can think what we like. Impartiality is the child of considered thought
 
CR
2.3.22

Last month I was baggy at the seams to but this month, to use a trade term, it's all a bit raggy. What means this, you cry? Like a Rag Week? Clever teasing all over the place from Block 6 to the MUGA? Sadly, no. Just a feeling that things could be tighter, could be tidier, could be more neatly tied up.

I don’t usually fess up to such given that my reader is likely to be a parent so I avoid horse-frightening. However, desperate times and so on. Here’s what we’re dealing with.

The blindingly obvious and unbelievably tedious Covid experience is largely of absence now, rather than illness, and folks having to be off for the regulation 5 days knocks a hole in teaching. Teaching is the heart and root of our endeavour so once that starts to wobble, unhelpful waves are set up (I’m no physicist, I’ve said it before). It was worse, before Christmas, but last week we had eight supply teachers in as well as using every spare ounce of in-house capacity. That’s a lot of children without their familiar adult in front of them, a lot of learning from textbooks. It’s a lot of classroom doors without anyone scanning the corridors and a lot of teachers’ desks in disarray. It’s a lot of seating plans being not quite enforced and a lot of independent learning not being set in the usual way. I’m not saying things have fallen apart, I’m saying that there is more room for the unexpected.

Adventurous souls may love this, encountering the mystery in daily life and so on. We pride ourselves on our creativity and inquisitiveness, our exploration and openness at Tallis, but adolescents need and really value security and structures. They don’t tell you this, of course, because they’re programmed to be risk-takers and to kick against restrictions while they find their feet in the world. It just so happens that the conditions for safe curiosity and happy investigation are optimum when the enfolding arms of the school are absolutely reliable and almost tiresomely predictable. And punctuated by frequent reminders and helpful hassling by tutors and assemblies. I cannot overstate the importance of this undersung aspect of the English school system. I’ve written about tutors before, the family unit of any school, especially important in a big one. We try to double-staff tutor groups to safeguard daily continuity but there are limits. No one is staffed for a pandemic. Without every tutor being in place, messages don’t carry. Troubles are missed. Children bottle things up and then unbottle themselves unusually.

Piling Pelion upon Ossa, we’ve lost assemblies. Yes, we have them online and Heads of Year deliver their brisk and uplifting messages through cameras showing children in tutor rooms sitting neatly and listening quietly, but it’s just not the same. You can’t eyeball a fidgeter through a camera. You can’t calm 270 people into silence and quietly move them to a spotlit room where a communal experience reinforces the ethos and mores of the institution. You can’t laugh with them, and you certainly can’t give them a good old-fashioned piece of your mind when daily routines show signs of wear and tear. Schools miss assemblies when we can’t have them: that’s why we go through all sorts of shoe removal malarkey to do them in PE spaces in exam season, but for two years we’ve hardly been able to have them at all. Three year groups are frankly unfamiliar with the whole concept and the older ones have forgotten. That means that children don’t see the school in session formally, don’t experience the obvious manifestation of the secure boundaries, don’t understand themselves as a valued participant in a community endeavour. They’re left to make sense of their immediate, personal, experience which is harder to interpret when the faces at the front are unfamiliar, even a bit confused themselves, perhaps.

I took part in a survey this week. The new Secretary of State seems keen on finding stuff out, which is a welcome change from his predecessor who didn’t give two hoots. One of the (admittedly fatuous) questions was about the impact of the call for ex- or retired teachers to rally to the colours with their board markers akimbo. What? There has been absolutely no impact. Has anyone seen one, anywhere?*

It wouldn’t have made any difference, except in basic supervision. The thing we’re really up against in secondary can’t be helped by strangers, supply teachers or Sally Slapcabbage. The second problem is, already weighted down by absence. We’re drowning in exams. It's good that the specification reductions have been declared by the exam boards and reasonable that it was done at this point so that most children might have been taught most of the courses. It's unavoidable that people are irritated by the timing or the contents - we live on our wits and we argue with the furniture if there isn’t anyone else around. It’s just that the contingency arrangements for no-exams have to run alongside the arrangements for having exams. That means that we have to have three formally assessed piece of work ready in school, just in case, as well as finishing the courses and getting children who have never taken formal exams ready to do it. In a school with a big sixth form, that’s wall-to-wall examining since early December meaning more lesson disruption followed by endless, endless marking as well as preparation for teaching and now, reorganising schemes of learning to reflect the reduced content. No wonder everyone’s a bit twitchy.

But the mopping up of quotidian flotsam caused by staff absence has to take precedence, so time is concentrated even further and everyone gets a bit more frantic. You can’t lock yourself away to mark or plan if the exam class next door hasn’t got a specialist teacher or the little ones look as though they might behave foolishly. I’m not complaining, just explaining. I wonder, had the PM given any thought to lifting the contingency requirements when he was boldly announcing that we’d be free of all restrictions by the end of Feb so that he didn’t have to apologise to the former DPP? What? Hadn’t thought it through? Really? Hasn’t he got advisors? Oh wait….
 
CR
10.2.22
 
*SEND Green Paper, Mr Zahawi?       

Oh! Lord Agnew! My dear!

Regular readers may recall this Agnew’s previous appearances in this column in his former guise as Academies Minister. The eminence grise behind the Inspiration Trust, from where we also got our Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza, he once made an offer we could almost all refuse. Putting accountants on the road, he promised a bottle of champagne to any school where his people couldn’t find savings, though whether Chateau Co-op or Pol Roger remained mysterious. ‘Use curriculum driven budgeting’ he cried, as if there was any other sensible way of desperately trying to make four bob educate two thousand people for thirty-eight weeks.
​
I can forgive him all for this, however, for his magnificent appearance in the Lords last week, resigning furiously over the amount of money wasted by government through ‘schoolboy errors, arrogance, indolence and ignorance’. As minister in charge of counter-fraud he had no alternative but to resign, what with the mountains of fraud hemming him in on every side. 

Such behaviour has a touch of retro-novelty in these troubled times. A man is given a job to do, finds he can’t and so resigns. Gosh. From Richard Cromwell to John Major this was once taken as read as principled behaviour, but standards have slipped this last decade and now it seems perfectly reasonable for the power-mad to cling to power no matter what. I write, of course, before the publication of that report, so by the time you read this I may be embarrassingly out of date.

We’re quite big on schoolboy errors here, as we have a lot of actual schoolboys. Picture the scene. A class of twelve-year olds is released form bondage at 12:20 to go to lunch. Queues form in a big community so it’s in their interest to stave off starvation by pegging it down the corridor the faster to bucket across the yard. A man of some experience plonks himself sturdily in their way and after cartoon screeching-to-halts the matter is put up for discussion. He sympathises, but makes them walk. I know what you’re doing because I used to do it. It’s obvious, but still a bit dangerous, you have to walk in the same way that I had to walk. Sorry, lunchers. Committing traditional mistakes anew is a schoolboy error. Getting caught is a schoolboy error.

But there’s a reason for the nomenclature. Schoolboys have infuriating, reckless and bizarre in their job description. While their synapses are forming they’re meant to make errors because they don’t know any better. From footballs to eating to hoods indoors and missing homework, schoolboys through the ages have tended to the random and boisterous, to the flying-by-the-seat-of-the pants, to justifying actions in risible ways, citing necessity, dogs, love or hunger. They don’t always take instruction and they can make you seize your own head in despair.

Much is forgivable in the young but mind-boggling in the old. I wouldn’t expect much sympathy if all of my countless and tedious parent emails since March 2020 had begun with ‘I don’t know what’s right or wrong’ or ‘no-one’s told me what to do’. We’ve lived through a time when everyone was telling us what to do and we, the people, largely embraced it with stoicism and good sense. Birthdays were unmarked, family celebrations postponed, spontaneity disappeared. We thought everyone was doing it – but it seems not. 

There’s nothing wrong with childlike-ness. Being relatively innocent and inquisitive, seeking to enjoy life in the moment and to its fullest has a lot to be said for it. We rate optimism and inquisitiveness on planet Tallis.  Childishness is another matter. Seeking to excuse oneself, refusing to learn from mistakes, wiggling around the facts and expecting others to love your whim and caprice so much that you can do what you like is not adult, moral behaviour. Bleak House may be Dickens’ finest novel but the creepiest, flesh-crawling-est character is the venial Harold Skimpole, masking greed and irresponsibility in tedious foibles while fleecing his friends and abandoning his dependents.

It's not for me to say what must be done on the national stage (though you might guess what I think), but I refer you to previous messages. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship. All adults are role models to the young, and the higher they’re exalted, the more important the modelling. We have standards for public life, of selflessness, integrity, openness, honesty, objectivity, accountability and leadership. They’re not hard, but they need attention. It’s not always fun to be good, but it is always right.

Agnew’s an unlikely hero. He couldn’t abide being made a fool of and nor, I think, can the rest of us. For me, the example being set to the young is irretrievable. It undermines the democracy and the rule of law that we’re meant to teach as a Fundamental British Values for Pete’s sake. All our lives have been made materially harder by sloppy national leadership.

I’m enjoying Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House. I like a bit of good chairing and he’s a delight. Last week he was trying to calm everyone down, little knowing that he’d still have to be doing it a week later. ‘You may not like this day’ he advised, ‘but this is the day we’ve got’. May it pass briskly, for all of our children’s sakes.  
 
CR
27.1.22

I was wandering in science, and dropped into a cover lesson, all going well. I berthed near a pair of girls, one with green hair. They were doing something that required sheep drawing but were dissatisfied with their efforts. In this, I could help. Sheep figure frequently in RE what with the parables and so an occupational by-product means I can draw them pretty sharply, in the manner of clouds with legs.  I demonstrated as much on the walkabout rota sheet. The ladies were not only delighted but could also remember the sheep-and-goats routine, so that’s a job done. Who needs performance management?  

January requires new thinking even though it's halfway through the school year. I’m thinking about three unmanageable topics at once, just to keep me fresh. 

First, as per, ethics. I talked to some young staff yesterday and we chewed over the values and virtues of the Framework for Ethical Leadership. The biggest ethical problems they identified – unsurprisingly – were the way we measure the value of a young person based on their academic scores, and the kinds of curricula we push them through. Wouldn’t it be better, several mused, for young people who struggle on our fearsomely overloaded GCSE courses, to be allowed to take very practical courses about looking after themselves and saving money?

Well, yes, perhaps all children need that, but the argument is multi-faceted. Why shouldn’t a child who cannot score at GCSE History be exposed to some of the stories and lessons from history? They need to be able to tell the difference between truth and revisionist lies as much as anyone else. The problem is in the qualification, which has to be the same for everyone and apparently, inexplicably, shamefully, has to have a third of below-pass grades (‘fails’ in normal person’s language). The problem isn’t with history, but the way we measure children using a qualification designed to prove some old lie about teacher slacking.

They’re not worried – and why should they be, learning to be a teacher is hard enough – about admissions. Mike Ion wrote about it in Schools Week last week and I couldn’t have put it better. He railed at the use of parental interviews, school fund requests, birth and marriage questions and the use of tests, all for y7 entry, and how the sharp-elbowed negotiate it all. The fact remains, he says, that secondary school admissions are ‘the secret scandal of our system, fostering delusions about consumer choice and reinforcing outdated perceptions of quality in education. 

My second issue is linked, about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). I’ve just seen a great article in the TES about SEND ‘magnet schools’. This is also to do with performance and admissions of course, but also with the limited understanding some educators have of their role in building up a good, national, comprehensive system.
It goes like this:

Bagpuss Comp has good provision for SEND, so increasing numbers of parents of SEND children choose Bagpuss over Rupert High. The Ruperts then say to any inquiries - we don’t have much provision for SEND, have you thought of Bagpuss? Neatly circular. Further, the money that Bagpuss gets isn’t equal to the provision specified in the Education, Health and Care Plan, and the likelihood of their meeting performance measurements is constrained. All the Bagpuss children get a worse deal, resources-wise and the clipboard brigade descend, with the usual range of results.

Some schools are really committed to inclusion. Some avoid it. How is that allowed?

You’ll recall my tedious attempts to communicate with G Williamson, late of Sanctuary Buildings, SW1. Nothing daunted, I may try afresh with Mr Zahawi who seems pretty efficient. He’s about to publish a consultation on SEND of which we Bagpie have rightly high hopes. I will report further on this.

I regret I don’t think even the SoS can help the third issue, to which all the above are stuck like glue. That’s of the retracted, restricted thinking of educators who take measurable achievement at 16 for their lodestone, inexorably drawn to it such that they don’t recognise the responsibility to map their own path so that their school makes sense as part of our national provision for all of our young. Does it increase results? No? Don’t do it, appears to be the mantra.

A colleague told me she was going to treat herself to a trolley now that the financial year is nearly up: a small pleasure. She needs a bit of help to get herself and her baggage from A to B. So do we all, but the hallmark of a good society is how fairly it distributes its goods, in both senses. I’ve told everyone who gets an email from me that I’m reading Sandel, and I often quote Rawls. There’s no better way to start a new year that with two philosophers. They say: