Doubly blessed, Ofsted called on us twice last year. Let me tell you the whole story because some readers, perhaps on Mars, may not have heard this yet.

Regular readers will recall that we had a one-day inspection in January 2018. These were an Ofsted scheme for quick inspections of good schools. They’re also short of cash so it was a reasonable efficiency plan. They didn’t look at the whole school, just stuff they had a hunch about from the data. One option after a short inspection is to say – well, yes, you’re still good, but you need to sort out stuff and we’ll be back after a year. That’s what they told us: look again at maths and English, think about higher ability pupils, and carry on improving feedback to children.  We were working on all of those. We are always working on all of those. 

Perfidiously, the phone rang after 11 months, but we were ready.

In the meantime, there’d been a lot of hoo-hah about Ofsted’s new inspection plans. Realising that just looking at data skewed the way schools behaved, and that curriculum had become dangerously under-thought in many schools, Ofsted declared themselves interested in what was being taught, rather than just outcomes. They were rightly bothered that schools were being entirely turned over to producing the kind of things that inspectors like rather than educating children. They also wanted to tackle some issues in the system, such as off-rolling and three-year key stage fours. Off rolling is the underhand practice of removing underperforming children from the school’s roll so they don’t count in progress scores: three-year key stage fours are said to narrow children’s experiences.
This proved interesting for us once we got the five chaps into the building. We dealt with the off-rolling very quickly. We work very closely with the LA, we take in more strugglers than we send elsewhere and we know exactly where they’ve gone. They were impressed with our commitment but returned to the matter of the curriculum later.

Inspections are half carried out in the Head’s room. There’s a long phone call the afternoon before they come and a longer meeting when they arrive. These check that we know what we’re doing and we have a plan to do it better. After that, they investigate aspects of leadership and management: curriculum, pastoral, inclusion, safeguarding, personal development, attendance, exclusions and so on. They meet groups of staff, governors, parents and students. Simultaneously, they rush about going into lessons to see what’s being taught, or look at a theme. They collect up information and swop observations at the end of the day. Then they invite the Head into their meeting so you get the drift of their thinking.

This end-of-the-day meeting is meant to be open and inclusive, a benefit to Heads. In my experience it’s absolutely terrifying. I’d added a wild card as I was largely unable to hear anything they said. I’d been to the doctor earlier in the week, and was awaiting a return visit. That meant that Mr Tomlin had to accompany me everywhere as interpreter and I was forever asking the chaps to speak up. In these end meetings the Head is meant to be a silent observer, not bellowing what are they saying? like a comedy granny to an amanuensis trying hard not to laugh.  At the end of the second day there’s a final meeting with governors and the LA where the lead inspector reads the verdict and declares the deed done. He or she writes the report that night. After an interminable wait for the report to be quality assured, a confidential draft with a 24-hour turnaround appears. There’s no real right of reply, only for factual inaccuracies. Phew.

We’re pleased with our report. Inspectors have told us to persevere with improving progress. They have reminded us that we need to think hard about the impact of starting GCSE in year 9 and whether all children thereafter follow a broad and balanced curriculum. They encouraged governors in their governing. These are all very fair points.

Inspectors thought the sixth form was outstanding with excellent teaching, great outcomes. They had 30 minutes earmarked to talk to students but were trapped for 90 minutes until students were satisfied they’d got the point.  That’s how we do it here: if in doubt, explain again.

They liked the work we put into inclusion and the personal development of children. They thought that was outstanding too and used the un-Ofsted language of ‘first class’, which is nice. Everything else is good. We’re glad to be good with outstanding features. It is a fair judgement. We went over the whole report as a staff on Wednesday afternoon and looked hard at what we need to do. Governors and school will form this into our next strategic plan, and we’ll put this on the website later in the year.

Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to get this, and thank you to parents who told the inspectors what they thought of us. They’re not used to hearing from so many at secondary level.

Tallis life goes on. Out on the bridge, a rare sighting of Mr Post-16 Study Room at large with an older young person. They pass sedately and are replaced by two year sevens at roadrunner speed trying to hold worksheets to their chests using only forward momentum (which may be the wrong word), shrieking loudly. Below stairs, Sir Detention annoys a detainee by analysing the correct use of ‘innit’ while Ms Reception rushes to First Aid with a little wheelchair. Humanutopia pack up in the hall after a day’s work holding year 9 to account for the way they treat one another. Two visitors are blown away by dance and drama. It’s getting darker, but there’s no snow.

Tallis should be 50 when the inspectors next call. We’d like them to be even more impressed then: Tallis the brave, onwards and upwards! Plenty to be getting on with.

You can read our inspection report here.

There’s an open meeting to talk about the report and related matters on Monday 11 February at 1800 in the Hall.     
 
CR
31.1.19

It's year 11 picking-over-the-mocks time. Teachers have a strange relationship to mocks.  They set hard papers because that’s the point of a mock, to show the children what they’re up against. Then they worry that it will upset them or depress them, then they worry that it’s not really a good indicator of what happens in the next few months. For the number crunchers upstairs, results are one thing, but predictions are another.  We work on what we’ve got.

For some year 11s, however, mock results bring an outbreak of self-justification, soul-searching and sudden insights. They tell you how little or how much work they did for the mocks, the blinding flash of light it has shone on the last four-and-a-half years and exactly how different a person they are going to be hereon in. ‘Of course the thing about the mocks……’ they begin, having taken them once and never again, and as if their teachers could do with some contextual advice.

That’s fine. We learn from experience and mistakes and it is the crowning glory of adolescence to see everything newly minted and focused on the self. January is a good time for self-examination: I used to do that, but now I do this. I used to play on my phone but now I watch GCSE pod. I used to eat chips but now I’m all veg. I used to answer back but now I grit my teeth. As one said to me yesterday, demonstrating the teeth work and the sound effect. I reserve judgement on whether the recipient will find that any less annoying. 
 
Adults too. Those who arrived in September have now got the hang of the place and are starting to offer analyses and suggestions. Old lags watch the year turn once again. Otherwise undemonstrative folks are thrilled by November GCSE resit maths and English results: a perfect example of a mistake made in the past put right at second try, for many. New starters are both perky and chipper, and you can’t ask for more than that. Some make helpful suggestions about the car park, for which I am, of course, grateful. It is our Schleswig-Holstein question.  All are bemused by the plumbing problems which best us.

There was a nice piece about Tallis in Schools Week last week. SW is an influential on-line newspaper and they came to look at how we’ve reduced exclusions, in the national context of exclusions rising again. Excludable behaviour is obviously part of the mistake-making of adolescence and, by trial and error, we think we’ve found a better way.

One of the methods we use is restorative meetings. Combatants of all sorts have to meet together to resolve differences and agree a way forward, or just make a proper, personal apology. Ms in charge says ‘twenty minutes’ awkwardness is worth it for a year without awkwardness’. It is the human way.

I had another thought about the human experience on Monday. I set off late to assembly so dived into the viewing gallery at the back, watching proceedings from a bit higher than the back row of the seats. This made for a very different assembly from the ones I usually see from front or side. From there, I get 300 faces and the performer in the stage lights: all very real, and close. From the gallery it’s more like being at the pictures. The back row is a long way from the action and when the Head of Year, Deputy Heads and whoever else has fine words to impart doesn’t stand in the stage lights, you can barely see them. You can see a lot of backs of heads, but those aren’t nearly as friendly as the fronts.  I’m thinking about what this means for our messaging, while threatening assembly-givers with a gaffer-tape cross to stand on.

I’m thinking because distance makes for glibness and detachment. Mock exams are years, then months away. That’s like another lifetime to a young person whose revision can start sometime after the next ice age. Maturity is signalled by the sudden realisation that you can SEE May from here and the weeks need a bit of attention. If you’re at the back of assembly, does it make a difference to how much a part of the community you feel?

Which brings me to the inevitable. No, not Ofsted, still no report. Brexit. One of the million problems with Brexit is that it has been approached rather like mock exams. It was once all in the future, so there was plenty time for posturing.  Now it’s here, and the revision hasn’t been done, and everyone’s flailing about blaming everyone else and some won’t meet with others. Meanwhile, the world turns and the year moves on. The people get poorer, the public services are neglected and we’re stepping over the homeless in the streets while young people murder one another. And those who caused the mess are so far from the people that they might as well be actors on a distant stage. It’s all very well saying ‘We’ll still be breathing if there isn’t a deal’ but that’s a pretty low bar to set. The good life requires more.
​
Enough with the self-justification. We need the soul-searching and restorative action, now.
 
CR 17.1.19

As ever, I can’t tell you about last week’s visitors until so long afterwards that you might have forgotten we ever had them. They’ll send their thank-you letter in January, so that’s something to look forward to once the sprouts are gone.

So, a little round-up of the end of term. Last week was Tallis through the Wardrobe, a magnificent evening in best surreal Tallis style. Dancers, singers, performers of all sorts from the tiniest to the biggest. It was a happy show. I’d been temporarily deprived of hearing so I didn’t get much of the detail, but the atmosphere was lovely. I didn’t have the brass neck to ask them to do it all again, for a third time, just for me, once I’d had my ears washed out, though it would have been nice.

One of the advantages of being at a school for a bit – this is now my sixth year – is that you see the children grow.  The little ones who bounced squeakily in 2013 are now loping year 12s who can barely see me from their great height: piping singing boys now beautiful basso profondos. As I write, the gallery next door to me is full of this year’s year 7s taking part in a week-long world peace game. They’re pretty ear-piercing when tackling the arms dealers amongst them but it’s going to be a great long-term memory. One is urgently shouting ‘Charlie, Charlie’, perhaps modelling global leadership on POTUS, or the Queen. Knowing how to solve the world’s problems at 11 is a pretty good training for life, no?

As are the inevitable. I told you about our preparation for mock exams with year 11, yoga, revision timetables and what not. Now the poor souls are staggering towards the end of it and reflecting on what they’ve done and left undone. One leaned on the doorpost this morning and told me he was too busy revising to have written a revision timetable. Poor chap thought I’d believe him, but when he says he’s worried about Computer Science, I believe that. Study Hall (a history classroom) was stowed out yesterday, flash cards from wall to wall, a marked improvement on just gazing into the middle distance in the hope of accidentally remembering something. 

You know how we make a mega-production over exam rituals? Meeting in the Bistro, reminding about the structure of the exams, walking quietly upstairs clutching the see-through pencil case, all under the beady eye of senior staff who happen to be free, subject leads, the vast army of invigilators and their Head of Year. Sir and his giant parka arrange the confident, reassure the anxious and hassle the late. I’ve asked it before: what’s the equivalent of a Head of Year in adult life?

Their performances in assemblies this week has been memorable too, cheesy in the extreme. Concealed in the aforementioned wardrobe, elf-behatted HoYs and other ancillary services have been jumping out to sing to the people. Year 7 nearly died of excitement yesterday morning: year 9 were more phlegmatic on Monday.  
  
So, having established that Heads of Year of any size are inherently comical in conical hats, we prohibited any kind of excitement going into assembly as the 270 assemblees had to be threaded through the up-to-270 revisionists to get into the hall. Simple instructions were sufficient, we assume that sporadic reminders instil precise cooperation. Crucial, daily orders were implemented effectively, for which we show our gratitude. Do you see what I did there?  11 words of the week!  Impressive or what?

Were I younger, I could be rewarded for such egregious compliance. Certainly M, who visited me three times on Thursday, seems to feel that his devotion should reap points of some kind. He’s got 87 points and is keen to make 100. He may have left it too late.

This afternoon we rest from our labours after our traditional Christmas whole-school assembly, the only time we’re all together as a school. It takes 200% longer than the assembly itself to get everyone in and out, but we think it worth doing just for the spectacle and the experience. This is our school, our village, our home from home for the days and the years and it’s good to be together once a year.

Next door a bell rings for four Prime Ministers and the Secretary General to reflect on their achieving world peace.  Compared to the scenes in Parliament yesterday, their noisy excitement is enthusiastic and positive. They know that far-sightedness and cooperation are vital to policy-making and the security of the people.

The originator of the wardrobe, C S Lewis, who I otherwise find irritating, once said:

I am now in a position to report back to you on these little ones who are now 15 and 16. That position is lying flat, running on the spot, saluting the sun or exhaling carefully from each nostril, because I found myself eyeballing yoga in the Dojo with one of the above classes this week. Let me tell you, they’re looking pretty chipper and they’re very bendy.

You might be tempted to ask why a woman of my stature – and I mean that literally – is doing yoga with children, but you’d be better off asking how. It’s not easy with my arthritic knees, and I could only do some of it and yes, yes, I know that if I did more of it I could do more of it. I didn’t even close my eyes, for example, which seems important in yoga and remains within my physical capacity.

As a general rule, parents expect those charged with the care of their young to keep their eyes open, if not peeled. I can’t imagine a teacher anywhere who would close her eyes with 50 year 11s in the room. Anyway, if I’d closed my eyes I wouldn’t have seen them and the seeing was the joy: my physical flexibility is nothing to do with the case.   
These fidgety and energetic young people were model yogis. They were entranced by it. Artfully arranged by Sir so that they weren’t burdened by peer pressure they were free to listen, watch, try and relax. They breathed, lay, stretched, and ran like good ‘uns. Not one of them let embarrassment stop them participating.  Each of them, after a full hour of pretty silent concentration, was wreathed in smiles. One asked for the name of the music. One said she didn’t like her leggings, but got over it.

Good grief, why? Why weren’t they in maths? I hear you ask. This was one of our Community Days in which we try to give young people a bit of exposure to aspects of adult life. Schools are where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizenship, and there’s quite a lot to that. Keeping control of yourself and not getting overwhelmed is the message we give to year 11 on this particular annual day. We do team games, revision planning and, yes, yoga. All year groups do something a bit different. Year 10 worked with external partners about avoiding gangs and violence, for example. Year 12 debated. We usually take year 7 for a walk, but the weather was against us.  

One of the other year 11 sessions was mindfulness with crochet. I didn’t get to that, but you’d probably like to know that though my knitting is serviceable, I’ve never crocheted but I can at least pronounce the word, which sets me apart from the crowd, it seems. A senior person confused governors almost beyond endurance with talk of crotchet training, and year 11 themselves made only garbled sounds. 

Having something to do with your hands is important if you’re a fidgeter. HMCI Spielman has been seen to crochet, and I once went to a lecture by the late Heinz Wolff where he gave us bits of Meccano to fiddle with while he spoke. This amused the nuns siting behind me, one of whom poked me in the back and said it was the first time I’d sat still all day. 

But today I sat tidily with the Director in the Woolwich Centre while we talked about our plans for this year 11 and two weeks ago I sat still into the night chairing a meeting about the usefulness of arts research and measurement to school decision-making. A Tallis friend, Tate’s Anna Cutler, talked about measurement, about space, time, content and method. She said two very arresting things. The first was obvious: art and schools have endured and will be around for a long time, despite current measurement trends. The second was chilling. She talked about South Korea’s reviewing of their school curriculum in the light of an unacceptable level of child suicide. What, she posed, would be an acceptable level?

We know that the way we measure children has got out of kilter with the things we value in life. We try to mitigate a little of that in a small way at Tallis while still doing what we’re expected to do to equip them with the qualifications for the adult world. Don’t begrudge them a couple of hours in the year focusing on deep breathing: it’s the least we can do.   
 
CR
29.11.18        
 
  

Imagine the scene. Over 2000 people on the concourse, fluttering strings of red messages, life-size photographs of soldiers, nurses, civilians, children of the wars, representatives of five faiths and a very tall bugler in full dress uniform, including bearskin. Last post sounds, two minutes silence, then Reveille. The bugler snaps smartly to attention and salutes. A good number of children are so startled by this that they salute back, before we have our usual Tallis claps and disperse for break.

We planned this year’s Remembrance for a while to make sure that the 100th anniversary of the armistice wasn’t missed. We worked with filmmakers internally and externally and people shared family stories. We made poppies and even had a special lunch menu – heavy on the pie and root vegetables, with a rather toothsome fruit cake. And we goggled at each other in properly inquisitive manner. One colleague who joined us from the army had beret and medals and a girl rushed up to me. ‘I’ve just seen Sir, he’s wearing all his badges.’ A chum put her right. ‘Not badges, medals. He didn’t get them for being brave at the dentist’.

Yet the lasting memory for me took place out of sight of the crowds, out of earshot of the bugle. We gathered guests from mosque, church, gurdwara and synagogue in my room to welcome them before 11, sharing perspectives on Remembrance and seeing Muslim and Jew embrace, heartfelt, like brothers. 

So much time in school is spent trying to teach young people that love, friendship, kindness, cooperation, tolerance and peace is better than hate, suspicion, cruelty, threats, violence and war. The adult world sets a terrible example to adolescents who are quite capable of making entirely idiotic choices in social affairs. The great liberation educator Paulo Freire described this very aptly as them being ‘caught up in the drama of their own existence’.  Teenagers prefer to fan flames of outrage, rather than damp them. They enjoy gossip and rumour and they’re very poor at seeing the longer game. They’re prone to hyperbole, and they lack the experience to know that some things just don’t matter.

Some of these irritating characteristics are also strengths. Deep interest in other people, a strong sense of justice, faithfulness to friends and living in the moment are characteristics worth having. In their turn they’re better than indifference, isolation and living in the past. At its best, Remembrance focuses on the good, on the resilience of the human spirit.

But the personal wars our young people inhabit are terrifying when they go wrong. When intense self-regard or sensitivity to pressure turns inward to self-harm, when justice seems to demand violence, when sociability becomes persecution. Adults should live to protect young people, from those who’d do them harm and from themselves while the turbulence of adolescence rages.

This is why I’m so annoyed almost everything in social policy at the moment – if that term isn’t itself an echo from better days. When Universal Credit doesn’t work, its children who go hungry. When schools can’t afford support staff its children whose needs are unheard. When there aren’t any teachers its children whose hopes and dreams are scuppered. When there aren’t enough police its children, manipulated by adults fuelled by delusions of status, who kill one another.

The great Macneice poem I’ve quoted before (Prayer before Birth) has a verse that reads:

I am not yet born, forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
 
Our children need us, society, the state, to look after them because they are children and can’t look after themselves. They need us to protect them and help them to grow.  Just because we’re not sending them in their hundreds of thousands to die on the green fields of France doesn’t mean that we’re not sacrificing them. We need a safer, kinder world for them, now.
 
CR
15.11.18 
          

It’s a wet day and a small child is tangled in his mum’s folding umbrella in block 5. I assist and we proceed companionably upstairs, gradually uncovering destination cluelessness. He needs repeater stations to get him from place to place so we set one up with Miss in my office to complement the nice ladies on reception. Miss provides him with a post-it – his second of the day - to help. He sticks this on his jumper to keep it dry while repeating the umbrella experience with a sausage sandwich. 
 
Outside, we are buffeted by elements. A year 9 eccentric advises ‘we should put these clouds in the IER for throwing wet at people’ so we discuss if that would be foggy in a room. ‘No, but there’d be a lot of banging’. What? 

We’ve had trouble with water all week. First we didn’t have enough, then it went a bit cloudy, now it’s falling from the sky. At least the roofs don’t leak. If they did, though, we’d have £50k to spend on it, thanks to the Budget. Tallis is lucky to be watertight, though we pay for the PFI privilege. 
 
As the National Audit Office reckons schools need over £6.5bn just to bring buildings up to standard. The budget announcement was not warmly welcomed by school leaders. Tin-eared was used, also patronising. Demeaning was accurately applied by one Head who wrote:

You may know that Ofsted have been thinking, which is good. It’s even better that they’ve been thinking about ‘What is the real substance of education?’ or as a normal person might put it ‘what are schools for?’

​HMCI commentary: curriculum and the new education inspection framework
​
The clipboard brigade make several points, all of which deserve a big tick. I thought you might like a digest, shamelessly condensed and filtered through my own prejudices. They say:

1. Education is the vast, accumulated wealth of human knowledge, and what we choose to pass on to the next generation. A ‘curriculum gives a school purpose’. Hurrah!
2. That curriculum is the heart of education. It requires the pursuit of real, deep knowledge and understanding of subjects.
3. In too many schools, the curriculum is just a combination of the exam board specification, the timetable and the exam results. Not enough schools really think about what they want children to learn. This leads to a narrow range of subjects being taught and too much ‘teaching to the test’.
4. Inspections have placed too much weight on exam results.
5. The 2019 inspection framework will emphasise ‘the curriculum as the substance of education’. Inspectors will look at a school’s ‘curriculum intent’.
6. They’d like to see schools focusing on subjects and subject vocabulary.  
7. They’d like to be sure that ‘disadvantaged pupils are not put onto a stripped-back curriculum’.
8. They observed that expert teachers in the schools they visited ‘lived and breathed their curriculum’ and that good subject teachers are likely to stay in schools where subjects are valued.
9. A well-constructed, well-taught curriculum will lead to good results because those results will be a reflection of what pupils have learned. 
10. Parents need to know the substance of what their children are learning throughout their time spent in school. 

So far so good. Tallis approves Ofsted’s new thoughts, which will doubtless be a relief to them. But hold on!  What’s this? They don’t like three-year key stage fours, like we have. Why?
 
Three-year key stage fours originated at a time of intense exam pressure. Lots of schools did it to give more time to GCSEs and therefore improve results. This is part of the reason for the current panic about schools just focusing on English, maths, science, history, geography and languages, because that’s what’s been valued in national education talk in recent years. Therefore, lots of schools just do a quick rotation of arts subjects in year 7 and 8 and then don’t offer them much at KS4 so they can tick the ‘EBacc’ box of the subjects above. 
 
Tallis doesn’t do that. We have a very broad curriculum at key stage three with six hours a week of dance, drama, music, art and DT and a very large range of options in KS4. Choosing options early means that our children – who do one more option than many other schools, in any case – have the chance over three years to get into deep subject content, absorb it and make it their own. When I arrived at Tallis six years ago, I was very sceptical about choosing options in year 8 but was quickly converted. That’s not to say that we couldn’t improve the way we do it, of course. So, when the moment comes and we have to defend ourselves, we’ll have a few thoughts to offer inspectors about the what and the why, and how our choices enable us to keep a broad curriculum for everyone. Hurrah again!
 
It’s good news for everyone that Ofsted have made this commitment to the curriculum. I’m not just saying that because it’s Ofsted, but because it’s right. Schools are where society looks after its young, and the curriculum is what society thinks they should know. A broad, common curriculum which enables young people to think and reflect also means that the democracy speaks a common language. It builds up our communal life. That’s why good comprehensive schools with a wide curriculum are every bit as important to the health of the nation as the NHS.  A nation educated together across the whole range of human experience should be well-equipped to understand and change the world for the better. Hold on a minute, that sounds familiar…..
 
Speaking of which: Black History Month. We’ve had dancing, eating, talking, films and workshops. We’ve had two mini carnivals with mass dancing and Caribbean Come Dine with Me.  It’s been a joy. During the lower school carnival I was having our performance review with our Local Authority School Improvement Partner. I had to keep making excuses to sneak looks out of the window to see the children dancing to Sir’s music. They sent me up a plateful of outrageously good food but it didn’t make up for not being outside in the sun. A new colleague said ‘some schools would worry about losing control’ but we don’t. Our systems are good, our community strong and we love to dance, sing, cook and make things. We’re confident to do it because we value it, we do it all the time, and when we go back to class we know each other well enough to settle back down.

What are schools for? Being able to celebrate diversity and inclusivity with laughter and exuberance. That’s not a test you can teach to.
 
CR
18.10.18

I was minding my own business on the jolly old Southeastern into London Bridge when my attention was arrested by a poster advertising a grammar school served by the same locomotive. It asked rather loudly, ‘HAVE YOU JUST BEEN DEEMED SELECTIVE BY BEXLEY’S 11+ TEST?’

Immune to the concerns of other passengers I approached and photographed this shameless assault on language and then asked everyone on the mothership what it meant. I don’t allow that kind of talk at Tallis so no one knew.  Consulting the ether, apparently, ‘deemed selective’ is the status a child attains who has passed the 11+. Charming.   
I’m trying to keep up with the reading so I’ve already told you about Robert Verkaik and Melissa Benn this year. Now I’m going to tell you about another bonza tome, Miseducation : inequality, education and the working classes by Cambridge and LSE Emeritus Professor Diane Reay. Brought up on the Derbyshire coalfield, she taught in London primary schools for 20 years, so she knows a thing or two. It’s very readable.

Her first chapter, Why can’t education compensate for society? sets out her thesis. Both class and poverty have always distanced working class children from education, but recent fads and interventions have made this worse, not better.   

Focusing on test scores as a measure of school quality has a particularly dangerous effect on schools which serve largely poor communities. Those pressures – and their leaders’ choices - lead to narrowed curriculums and obsessive teaching-to-the-test largely unknown by more advantaged children whose teachers are more confident about results.   

Schools serving poorer communities have a majority of young and inexperienced teachers, committed and determined but rarely from similar backgrounds to the children. They may have been skimpily trained on programmes which stress the adoption of particular practices (fancy uniform, zero tolerance) said to be modelled on the public schools, but which rarely exist there.

Schools justify these hideous proxies because they say they need to re-shape children’s character and outlook in order for them to succeed. Some go further, saying that children from ‘chaotic’ homes need order and structure in school to be able to free themselves from the lives their parents lead. Some – fee-paying as well as and normal schools – equate parental worth with cars and holidays, a ‘nice house’.    
   
In this way, loose talk about social mobility becomes a frontal assault on the parenting of those trapped in poverty. ‘This education will give you a good life, better than your parents’. Ergo, your parents are deficient, shameful, they have let you down. Reay uses a clear phrase here, describing ‘shame as the darker side of optimism’. Optimism is expected in school, or at least its functional twin, aspiration. Optimism is natural to young people despite teenage gloom. Aspiration is more specific, always linked to hard work, good exam results and university entry. In this way, social mobility is outsourced to the child: if he isn’t sufficiently aspirational he throws away his chance of escaping poverty. It’s his fault.  

In a chapter called Class Feeling: troubling the soul and preying on the psyche’ Reay quotes from extensive interviews with children in primary schools where they define themselves by their grades, where they ‘know’ that they’ll have a ‘bad life’ if they get a ‘bad score’. This focus on grades above all, she says, has ‘shifted children’s self-identification as learners’. They are their grades, not their efforts and their insights. If grades are bad, they must be bad, and unworthy of escaping poverty.

While advantaged children also suffer from soul-destroying commodification by potential exam results, they do not have to engage in ‘rational computation’ in order to meet the goals that best suit their interests. If you ‘know’ that you will go to Oxford (Cambridge, St Andrew’s, Durham, Imperial or wherever) because that’s where people like you always go, you don’t have to think much about it. Everything about your life has readied you to get in. You are fine being yourself, you don’t have to learn to become someone else. Oh, and personal private tutoring is built into the family budget. 

So, not only do many poor children go to schools where the teacher shortage really bites, but some of the newly-popular ways of running schools are deliberately framed as places where children have to disown their parents.  From a position of poverty (30% of all children now), they are expected to value material success as an output of education which, if they fail, is their fault for not aiming high enough. While current policy claims to try to raise working-class achievement, by its approach and funding it actually ensures that failure is firmly located in the working class.  If you remain working class like your parents, you are a failure.  What kind of madness is this?
Uninformed madness. 'A plethora of spectacular educational irrelevancies such as standards, testing regimes, raising attainment and achievement levels, league tables, school choice, academies and charter schools, performativities and managerialism, image and impression management, academic/vocational streaming, punitive naming and shaming strategies and the rhetoric of school improvement and school effectiveness have obscured the crucial importance of social class to educational success.’

What does work? Reay says: collaboration rather than setting and streaming. Intense personal learning relationships between teacher and child that empower students as ‘knowers’. Passionate engagement, original thought. And perhaps working towards an answer to the question ‘why English education has never embraced approaches that work and adopts those that don’t?’ Grammar schools, anyone?  Why bother with the 11+ test? The evidence shows that the ‘deemed selective’ child was actually selected much earlier.

Anyway, the reason I was on the train to start with was to go on the Worth Less? school funding march. We were, as the organisers said, ‘relentlessly reasonable’ and have carried on being so this week as the sheer effrontery of the DFE claim about funding has been systematically unpicked and exposed as shameless falsehood. The UK Statistics Authority is calling it in for investigation, so all power to their spreadsheets and swivel chairs (which is how I picture them).  

I was directing traffic and some year 8 boys passed me. One said to the other ‘I’m praying for something good to come out of it’.  Who knows what that problem was, but Amen to that.
 
CR
4.10.18

I love a bit of advice. Following it is an entirely different matter but hearing it is interesting. Even annoying advice can be diverting, and the kind that makes you put on a cross-eyed face and bang your head on the table often makes a good story once you’ve had a cup of tea.

Its Open Day season, so the BBC – whose mission is to inform, educate and entertain – have combined all three kinds of advice in their Family and Education news page item School open days: eight things to look for. They ask ‘How can parents get behind the glossy prospectuses and slick presentations and decide whether this is the school for their child?’ Advice is given by three notables: former Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw; General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders Geoff Barton; and acting Chief of the organisation Parentkind, the umbrella group for PTAs and similar, Michelle Doyle Wildman. They don’t always agree. 

I thought I’d put a Tallis take on the tips in the hope of being helpful. We have Open Evening next week and then a weekly opportunity to come and see us at work on Tuesday mornings. For the record, our prospectus is matt not glossy, and slick would be accidental. We aim for honest and hope you also get engaging!
 
BBC Tip 1: Quiz those handpicked pupils who show you around
‘Handpicked’ suggests we send you round school with only the cleanest and shiniest students who’ve been trained up to say particular and positive things. On Open Evening we ask for volunteers, from children whose attendance and behaviour deserve recognition. On Open Mornings, however, we’ll dragoon a whole class or more to take people round. The only children we don’t use are those who are too shy to talk to strangers – and even then sometimes we pair them up so you might get a silent and loquacious duo. No one has a script. They say what they think is important and answer your questions honestly. If they make stuff up, we have no way of knowing. Adults wait at the return point, and you can ask for interpretation then if your guide has befuzzled you.  

Sir M says ‘ask them about progress since primary schools and if they’re in sets or mixed-ability classes.’ It sounds as though he has a view on the superiority of the former over the latter, for which there is no evidence. We’ll tell you about class organisation in our talk. Asking children how they think they’re doing is a sensible idea, though some year 7s will be going over previous learning – especially in maths – to check it hasn’t fallen out of their heads since the SATs. 
 
BBC Tip 2: Ask to go to the toilet
You’re very welcome to go to the loo at Tallis. Geoff Barton says that ‘the toilets pupils use say a lot about a school’s values’ and that is also true. Be our guest.   
 
BBC Tip 3: Bring your child
Of course. Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘Gauge their reaction, let the visit sink in’ rather than asking what they think straight away. Can I be honest? Choosing a school is a parent’s job. Children know too little about anything to make an informed choice. Of course, if a child declares he won’t eat or sleep if he has to go to Gasworks High and you think Bog Standard Comp is just as good, that’s a reasonable discussion. Don’t let your child make what you think is a bad choice. It’s not fair on them, and it will lead to endless unhappy conflict between school, parents and child.   
 
BBC Tip 4: Listen to the HT speech
Well hello there. What a rare treat that will be. Naturally the Head will educate, inform and entertain with matchless erudition, learning and good sense. I’m unscripted, but we always talk about children’s experience and our hope to fulfil our aim of education to understand the world and change it for the better.

Sir M says ‘leadership is everything in a school…... make sure he or she talks about progress and outcomes and is the sort of person and personality that will drive the school forward’. I’m not sure that leadership is everything. Leaders have to provide the conditions for success, but a good school is a good school because everyone there believes in it and works to make it better.

We will talk about progress and achievement at our Open Evening but the structure of the new system means that we might not have our GCSE Progress 8 result before the day. That result shows how well we’ve done compared to all other schools. I’ll tell you the scores, but they are a bit meaningless without comparison. I’ll also tell you what we’re working on and what we’re proud of, and what our priorities for the year are. I may mention in passing that we got 7 young people into Oxford and Cambridge this year, 2 into Central St Martin’s and 180 into university. I well may.

It’s rare that results are the biggest issue for prospective year 7 parents, to be honest. We’re more likely to be asked about the curriculum, happiness and the prevalence or absence of bullying. That’ll be why Michelle Doyle Wildman says ‘is the school taking a whole-child approach or is it more focused on the academic achievement? That’s a nuance you want to get in this process of looking at schools’.

Two different bits of advice there, folks. At Tallis, we’re whole-child-focused. We don’t look on children as output or yield for the good of the school, and we believe that school is where society looks after its young until they’re old enough to take on the mantle of adult citizens. We want to help them become rounded, self-regulating, kind and useful people. We want them to be well qualified, but we don’t judge the worth of a child by her potential exam results.   
 
BBC Tip 5: Ask tough questions
We like that. Ask away. Sir M says they should be about progress, strategies, interventions, provision for underachievers and destinations. Ask us anything.  
 
BBC Tip 6: Take a good look at the teachers
Geoff Barton says that the teachers ‘should look like a corporate body, welcoming and keen to talk about the school’. I’m wary of corporate looks, so you won’t find us in matching outfits, but we will be welcoming and talk about Tallis until you beg us to stop.

Sir M says ‘Do they look professional? Do they look like teachers? Are they well turned-out?’ What does a teacher look like? My mother and grandmother were both teachers – is that what they look like? Tweed jackets? M&S Suits? Knee-length skirt and sensible shoes? Heels and a silk scarf? A good teacher has a glittering eye and can’t stop talking about the wonders of the subject. He or she may be slightly unkempt from running fingers through hair for a large part of the day. Or damp round the edges from yard duty. Or covered in paint, sawdust, or whiteboard grime. Or carrying piles of books. Or in a tracksuit. It’s whether they seize and hold your attention that’s important. Look out for that.

Sir M says – ask about ‘unfilled teaching vacancies and the number of temporary or supply teachers’? That’s a good question in an obvious way. We have hardly any: 3 temporary teachers out of a force of 120. One of those is covering a maternity leave. Does that count? Another is a bit of extra staffing we put in just in case. Another is in a subject area of serious national shortage. 

There are 40,000 fewer teachers than we need in our school system. If a school has loads of temporary or supply teachers it might be because it isn’t a good place to work, but it’s more likely to be because there simply aren’t enough teachers. That’s a national scandal, not one school’s fault.    
 
BBC Tip 7: Visit again at home-time
If you like being surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of teenagers then home-time is just the place for you. If you are of a more timid disposition, you might want to watch from a distance. Sir M says is ‘uniform still worn properly, whether they’re congregating outside fast-food outlets misbehaving..…are there staff outside the school?’ All those are good to see, but schools are not police and the amount of time we can spend outside school supervising the streets is limited. At Tallis we enforce a curfew point at the Dover Patrol shops at 1600, but after that it is reasonable to expect parents to take responsibility for their offspring’s whereabouts.
 
BBC Tip 8: Write the date on your calendar
This may fall into the category of cross-eyed face and banging head on table. Of course you would.
 
We hope you come to see us next week and at other points if you would like to. We hope you find us engaging and interesting. We hope you’d entrust your child to us. Most of all, we hope you find us honest and humane partners in the crucial business of raising our children together. Welcome to Tallis!
 
CR
20.9.18

I return to the Tallis Hug. For new readers, this quite a feature. Students here hug each other desperately as if waving goodbye to an émigré, when they part for a lesson. They hug when they reconvene in sheer relief that the loved one is safely returned to whichever draughty part of concourse or canteen is home. This is inexplicable to the northerner for whom a raised eyebrow is an embarrassingly gushing show of affection. And they come pre-programmed. 

Directing canteen traffic in the early hours of the term small child rushed up to me with a story of lost bag, shoes and bus before leaving home, followed by confusion and excitement in school. ‘Now I’m FINE!’ she squeaked. ‘Can I get a hug?’ ‘No!’ I squawked, rearranging her outstretched arms and backing into a dinner lady. ’We don’t do that here!’  Which, as explained above, is patently untrue. What I meant was - you’ll find plenty people to hug here, but not adults and certainly not me. The exuberance of youth. 

In telling this rocket-propelled putative hugger something about the Tallis way I was – rather magnificently – following my own instructions. My theme for the year is Tallis as usual. We don’t want to invent any new ways of doing things this year, just to do everything we already do better, and more consistently. That’s not to say that we won’t have some creatively eccentric new ways of teaching, but we want our running procedures to be reliable, predictable and better.

Which subtle segue leads me into the general state of our education system. Not enough money, 40 000 fewer teachers that we need, exam system that can’t bear the weight put on it, financial scandals etc etc. My solution to most worries is reading so I’ve just finished Melissa Benn’s Life Lessons. Benn is a tireless campaigner for community comprehensive schools but in this little piece she also turns her attention to the state of adult education and the universities, as well as schools, proposing a National Education Service. (Before you reach for the pen to report me to the Secretary of State for contravention of Staffing and Advice for Schools September 2018 para 5:33 (expressing political views) this is not quite the same as the one that Labour talked about a bit at some point.)  It’s well worth reading, not least for this.

One of the things we often say at Tallis is that the comprehensive dream is a vision every bit as precious as the NHS, and every bit as complicated. Model communities of local young people taught with expertise and equity is a blueprint for a better society. There are other barriers, mind, and I’ll talk about my next reading book, Robert Verkiak’s Posh Boys next time. 

Reading was on the agenda in year 7 assembly too. ‘Reading makes you kinder’ said Ms R. ‘You all need to read more’.  Perhaps the year 11 boy who bizarrely told Sir in English that he wouldn’t need English after leaving school could be persuaded that he might need kindness? Not that the conversation I had with Sir didn’t have its odd turns.  It was in discussing the choice of poetry for GCSE that he gave me the title of this piece. Which poems would you rather read?

We are committed to love at Tallis in that we are committed to kindness and service. Part of that is to be reliable, predictable and better. War and love, love and service, expertise and equity, creativity and eccentricity: Tallis as usual, hold us to our promises.
 
CR
13.9.18

Ahoy there from the good ship Tallis. The crew are aboard and ready to sail tomorrow: I thought you’d be interested to know which flags we’re hoisting for the 2018-19 voyage?

I can’t actually go any further with this image. I like a nautical vision, but lack the knowledge to back it up. I know there’s a flag combination that says ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instructions immediately’ which is just the kind of thing that Headteachers like. I might have it made into a hat.

How were the results? Sixth form first. We’re pleased with them, and have got a bumper crop into university, art college and onto apprenticeships. Seven into Oxford and Cambridge and 2 into Central St Martins, lots of others on really competitive courses, into sought-after universities and where they wanted to go. We enrolled nearly 280-ish into year 12, which is jolly nice.

GCSE is hard to tell until we get our nationally-determined progress score in September. We hope to improve on last year’s. Some areas did super-well, some improved, some still need to improve, some were hit by misfortune.    We have a plan for all of it. Jane Austen wisely warns that Pride and Prejudice doesn’t give a description of the geography of Derbyshire and similarly this blog doesn’t go into detail about results. Look on our website for more. 

We have 18 new teachers (our total teaching force is about 120) and 22 new support staff and we all know each other now. Some works needed doing over the holidays which were done and some which weren’t done. We hit a PFI-related contractual problem with getting some ICT upgrades to classrooms and we’re sorry about that. I’ll keep you informed. There’s lots of shiny new paint about, some of it on me.

Yesterday we met as a staff and looked at the things we stand for, what we believe and how we try to do them.  Our Leadership Group is one smaller so we explained how the roles are shared out. We remembered that we want our young people to use our habits and be inquisitive, collaborative, persistent, disciplined and imaginative.  We committed ourselves again to our characteristics of being kind, fair, honest, respectful and optimistic. I talked about the work I’ve been doing on ethical leadership and the public service values of selflessness, honesty, openness, objectivity, integrity, accountability and leadership. I committed us to the ethical leadership virtues of trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. And we remembered how to use the data-collection system and met some of the PTFA. Curriculum teams spent time together planning and sorting.

Today we’ve done nuts-and-bolts stuff on classroom practice and expectations and systems, met as year teams, renewed our safeguarding training and looked again at GPDR. We are martyrs to excitement. New staff have tried to work out our frankly peculiar room numbering system and who everyone is. Planner, postcards, posters and lots of other things beginning with other letters have been gathered and squirreled away. Timetables have been printed and reprinted and all the lunchtime staff had first aid training.

Outside, education storms still buffet us all. We don’t have enough money. I did a phone interview for the Jeremy Vine show about mobile phones. Again. There’s a panic in the press about high rates of exclusion and schools’ internal exclusion methods. There’s panic about off-rolling year 11s, high rates of self-harm and London knife crime. Couldn’t we link those things? Schools without money can’t afford support services to help young people cope with themselves. That’s harder for them because all anyone talks about is results, as if that’s all childhood is for.  Shrinking police numbers and disappearing youth and outreach services leave struggling young people to chance and the market forces of the streets. As a nation we don’t care enough about them to spend enough money on them. But we care enough about Brexit, it seems, to spend our all on it.

And meanwhile the biggest injustice goes unaddressed. What do 22% of shadow cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs and Russell Group university Vice-Chancellors, 43% of newspaper columnists, 44% of the Rich List, 50% of the cabinet and the House of Lords, 55% of Whitehall Permanent Secretaries, 67% of Oscar winners, 71% of senior officers in the armed forces and 74% of senior judges have in common? All privately educated. The 7% keeping its stranglehold on the 93%. How do we fix this?

Storm cones hoisted. Time to understand the world, and change it for the better.
 
CR
4.9.18  

It is the end of the year.  Let me tell you we have had the best end of year. The greatest. So good, the top end of special.

I apologise if this sounds Trumpery but fear not. When I say we’ve had the best end of term that’s what I actually mean. I don’t misspeak and say that we have had the worst end of term, depending on the audience. What are we meant to do with this stuff?

We have surely crammed a lot into the last weeks. Bugsy Malone was huge, over a hundred in the cast and running for four nights. Some parents came every night. Primary schools come to watch the show’s dress rehearsal and we got them settled. Then we offered a toilet opportunity, 100 of them take it up and we have to start all over again.  Then the microphones don’t work – but it’s alright on the nights. The set is all-conquering. We certificate the sixth form leavers from Fat Sam’s Speakeasy, above the bar.

Our routines are a little affected. Year 10 line up for assembly tidily but I decide that occupying the hall on the morning of the first show might be best avoided. We walk year 10 in silence to the Dojo just to find the outdoor and adventurous activity briefing underway. We perform and about turn and walk up to the sports hall where muscle memory triggers crossed legs on the hard floor. It’s a surreal experience: 270 children and a dozen staff in search of an assembly. We could have kept walking until we’d done our daily mile: the yard was my last resort. 
A colleague warns me she’s annoyed, but goes for a run and cheers up. A musician works with a dancer on Motion Sickness, cello and Bach as part of our practice-based appraisal option. A leaver sells his paintings for charity. New teachers visit. Newly-qualified teachers breathe a sigh of relief at another hurdle jumped. I follow a small child rushing over the bridge in pursuit of a youth too cool to listen to her frankly impertinent cry of ‘Alice’s brother! Alice’s brother! Come to me’.

Parents contact me: some to complain that early holiday isn’t authorised, some to congratulate on specific things we’ve done or the general way of things, some to ask questions, some to advise, some helpful ideas, some impossible, but all welcome. 

There’s only one taker for Waistcoat Wednesday, though we like young Southgate who appears to value character.  Others say allez le bleus, insouciant.

We celebrate too, assemblies with certificates for attendance, endeavour, habits and character with advice on how to be a good audience thrown in gratis. Some prizes come with a pre-installed learning experience. I encounter Ms S on the yard with her form: a prize box of chocs caused 12 wrappers on the floor so now everyone’s tidying the yard.
 
And a final visit from Mr Brown’s dog. She enjoys the sleep of the just in a leadership group meeting but wakes to snuffle around a bit, startling a member who suspects one of the blameless brethren of unprecedented inappropriateness. Mr Brown himself departs. I’ll miss his comprehensive range of opinions and barely-concealed righteous fury on behalf of the nation’s young.

Which is justifiable if for no other reason than we head into the hols with no word from the School Teachers’ Review Body. This affects everyone’s budgets: discovering in September that a proposed teacher pay deal might or might not happen, or be funded will make for an excitable start of term. Perhaps they’ll put out the news on the same day as the results in the hols, in the hopes Heads won’t see it. Or next week, when we’re all having a lie down. As the unions have said to the Secretary of State:

I’m humming Bugsy as I potter about our scorched landscape. I love this show. It’s a perfect school musical: very little plot, and lots of opportunities for outrageous accents and hamming it up. Much like….anyway, Bugsy next week, get your ticket while you can.

This week was taster days for the New Year 12s and Headstart Day for the new year 7s. Taster day is the only time year 12 spend break and lunch on the yard.  Once they get into the swing of things in September they stay indoors, basking in a very small privilege and an even smaller canteen. Year 7 get an even less realistic experience. They’re met late at the gate, guided to where they need to be, ushered round by current year 7 sheepdogs, given a snack at break and lunch without others looking on. They don’t need to carry or remember anything other than their manners.
​
Just as well we keep them a bit apart so they can get the feel of the huge building, protected from fearsome sights. Mr Pape raising money for his tutor group’s trip using the wet sponge method: as a Mackem he’s used to cold.  Or the small youth I encountered last week with his jacket over his head, ruler in teeth, pencil case under one arm, water bottle between his knees, bag on back, and football under the other arm, looking for all the world like Jagger’s Great Western Memorial soldier at Paddington. ‘I’m a bit overloaded’ he remarked as we tried to rationalise his accoutrements.

And in a fit of forward planning we’ve actually been thinking about the Great War, and how to mark the 100th anniversary of its end. We’re inspired by work with the Imperial War Museum and we’d like to broaden our remembrance to fit our community, so if you know people who’ve served in any war and would like to help us, do get in touch.

Our curriculum consultation is spreading too. We had a meeting this week about the issue of the EBacc and whether the Tallis curriculum should change so that all our children take French or Spanish and history or geography to GCSE as well as English, maths and science. The government have an ‘ambition’ for 90% of children to do this by 2025. We are some distance from this figure and even further from liking it. We’re not convinced it’ll help children be anything that they wanted to be. Anyway, there’s a targeted survey out to 300 parents so if you’ve had one please fill it in.

Back to the year 7s. I passed a bunch of them on the stairs outside block one beside themselves with excitement, Sir bringing up the rear. A veteran of many campaigns he’s pleased to get some little ones to lick into shape. Other tutors will themselves be new so have the double bewilderment of guiding new children round a strange land. If you’re newly-qualified there’s a third confusion of quite reasonably not knowing what you’re doing at all, with children, who you’ve just met, in a building you don’t know, where the room numbering is like Esperanto (looks clear but is actually really foreign). Hence the 12-year-old sheepdogs.

However, there’s nothing like a year 6 for finding out information. We had a minor glitch before lunch was ready so the assembly-training needed to stretch a bit. Head of Year sought my public wittering skills but once I’d covered sleep, breakfast, bag-packing, buses, homework and queueing even I ran out of steam so threw it open to the floor. Unsurprisingly, this knocks all other methods of information-sharing into a cocked hat. We’ll build in henceforth.  ‘What do you do if you fall over?’ ‘When is the library open’ ‘What clubs are available?’ ‘How do I start my own’ ‘What if I forget something?’Go to reception. Morning, noon and night. Wait for announcements. Talk to your tutor. Learn to remember. The same answer really: time to stand on your own feet, but we’ll help you to do it. Like our chap with the kit crisis.

So after an afternoon’s whole-staff training on speech, language, communication and memory there’s a gap between school and Prom. Wednesday was the year 13 party, Friday the formal leaving ceremonies for the 16- and 18-year-olds who represent our finished product, our gift to the nation. Thursday a gaggle of staff in various levels of party gear await the antepenultimate viewing of year 11. Mr H has secured bling for the occasion. New year 7’s new Sir is year 11’s Mr Chips. 

This year: more navy or red dresses, a minor outbreak of burgundy suits, three pairs of velvety trainers covered with little spikes, gents’ jackets worn short and tight, one pair gold-tipped loafers, one newly-purple hair (previously blue), one surprisingly impressive beard, Head of Year regretting changing out of her trainers. At the door, the usual security, Ms Gallagher’s speech ‘You look great, we’ll check you over, have a great night’ and me gawping.  No horse and carriage, I’m sad to report, only a Tesla that wouldn’t oblige with a dance. Some of the suits don’t fit and the heels are more trouble than they’re worth, but that can happen at any age.

They could be anything that they wanted to be. Next week is Bugsy Malone, then the final week, then we stop, reset, and start again.
 
CR
6.7.18

A year 9 said to me exasperatedly on Wednesday: what exactly are schools for? It nudged me to presume upon your good will to ask a question about some work I’ve been doing. Would you mind?
 
I’ve spent a bit of time this year chairing a national group called the Ethical Leadership Commission. It’s a set of people from all sorts of groupings in education, including Ofsted. We’ve ben thinking about the fundamentals of school leadership, to see if we could help hard pressed folks to see beyond the daily things-to-do, things-to-worry-about and things-to-try-to-forget-about-for-now lists. We wanted school leaders to think about what schools are for and how they should act. Governors, as well as Heads.   
 
This seemed important not just because I like to get to the bottom of stuff. It’s important because the world has changed quickly in education. Now that different people and different organisations run schools, who is keeping an eye on the purpose of schooling, as well as its outcomes? Tallis is a straightforward case, still a community school run by the local authority. Other schools run themselves, are a part of an academy trust or a larger chain, some are church schools, some ‘Free’. I wonder if this confuses taxpaying citizens?
 
Despite differences in the system, we all have a one crucial thing in common: children. Tiny children, large children, noisy children, silent children, children who love school, aren’t so fussed, like big crowds, prefer to be alone, arty, music-y, scienc-y, mathematic-y, sporty, happy, thoughtful, angry and sanguine children. Parents send children to our schools – all sorts of schools – and trust teachers to do a good job with them. Largely we do. Sometimes there are blips.
 
Parents and society therefore trust us to do two things. First, to be diligent and trustworthy public servants.  Second, to model the behaviour of a good society to children: to show them how to be good citizens. Both of those are huge responsibilities. The first is carried out at work: doing a good job with teaching and results, for example. The second is harder to pin down. We teach character and values, but do parents see that in the way our schools run?   
 
The Ethical Leadership Commission has been working on three things. First, agreeing some key language that school leaders and teachers might use to talk about this. Second, to provide some training materials so that we can all think about this responsibility together. Third, to set up a structure so that there is a space to think about ethics and the pressures that sometimes constrain our decision-making. It’s interesting work, as you can imagine.
 
I’d be interested to know what you think of the draft words. The first seven are based very closely on the Seven Principles for Public Life. If you work in the public sector, you may know them.
 
The Framework for Ethical Educational Leadership
Ethical educational leadership is based upon the Seven Principles for Public Life.

1. Selflessness
Leaders should act solely in the interest of children and young people.

2. Integrity
Leaders must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. Before acting or taking decisions they must declare and resolve openly any perceived conflict of interest and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Leaders must act and take decisions impartially and fairly, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. Leaders should be dispassionate, exercising judgement and analysis for the good of children and young people.

4. Accountability
Leaders are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Leaders should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from scrutiny unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Leaders should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Leaders should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs. Leaders include both those who are paid to lead schools and those who volunteer to govern them.
 
The second set of words try to explain what we think makes up good leadership.
 
Schools and colleges serve children and young people and help them grow into fulfilled and valued citizens. As role models for the young, how we behave as leaders is as important as what we do. Leaders should show leadership through the following personal characteristics or virtues.
 
a. Trust:
Leaders should be trustworthy and reliable. They hold trust on behalf of children and should be beyond reproach. They are honest about their motivations.

b. Wisdom: 
Leaders should use experience, knowledge, insight understanding and good sense to make sound judgements. They should demonstrate restraint and self-awareness, act calmly and rationally, exercising moderation and propriety as they serve their schools wisely.

c. Kindness:
Leaders should demonstrate respect generosity of spirit and good temper. Where unavoidable conflict occurs, difficult messages should be given humanely.

d. Justice:
Leaders should be fair and work for the good of all children from all backgrounds. They should seek to enable all young people to lead useful, happy and fulfilling lives.

e. Service:
Leaders should be conscientious and dutiful. They should demonstrate humility and self-control, supporting the structures and rules which safeguard quality. Their actions should protect high-quality education. 

f. Courage:
Leaders should work courageously in the best interests of children and young people. They protect their safety and their right to a broad, effective and creative education. They hold one another to account courageously. 

g. Optimism:
Leaders should be positive and encouraging. Despite difficulties and pressures they are developing excellent education to change the world for the better.
 
None of us is claiming that we are perfect. All of us know that the responsibility is huge.
 
Are these the right principles? What do you think?
 
headteacher@thomastallis.org.uk
 
CR
22.6.18

​There’s a wonderful moment on a sunny June afternoon at about quarter past two. Lunchtimes are over, exams are settled and everyone is posted into their allotted slot. Overheard on the way up to an exam, four boys not previously noted for devotion to study ‘We’re doing all these exams but this place is full of little kids just running about in the sun. They don’t know our stresses, man.’ Anyway, teachers are teaching, students are learning, people are meeting, children are thinking, candidates are writing, technical staff are pottering about and pigeons are doing their pigeon thing.
 
My thing is Radio 4 so it was fun to open the day with a visit from a journalist from The Westminster Hour. He was interested in the way we’ve responded to the London knife crime issue and was recording a piece on our wanding of tutor groups after assembly to check for weapons. As parents know, we decided this was the better way of doing it. Rather than having a big set-piece with knife arches and lots of police outside school we have Mr Brown and Mr Sheedy with a wand each giving a randomly selected tutor group the once over, one at a time. He talked to some of the children and then to the three of us. It was intended to take 15 minutes, but he was with us for another hour once we got started.

We talked, as ever, about safety and keeping everyone calm and happy. We talked about security and the different ways we find out Stuff We Need to Know. We talked about the kind of public spending cuts that means that youth work is disappearing and the Police struggle to respond. We talked about the effect of highly academic curricula on students who need another route into lifelong learning. We talked about the pressures on schools and the cost of student support services and the other things that parents now expect us to do that we don’t get any money for. We talked about schools as model communities and our responsibilities to demonstrate the actions and calm responses of a good citizen.

We also talked about old fashioned teachering. The way that schools build up good relationships with students and families so that everything is do-able and nothing ends up as a big fuss or a stand-off between the fearful and anxious on both sides. He’d seen 300 students walk quietly into the Dojo, half of them with their shoes in their hands and sit listening to a range of announcements followed by a poem. He’d seen us chatting to the chosen form group about the wanding and the sensible discussion we had.

If he’d been in earlier in the week he’d also have seen Sir and Sir so absorbed in the experience that they then set off purposefully through school in just their socks. A third Sir suggested to them that they’d need shoes at some point in the day. Especially as they were wearing four different socks between them.

Cogitating on the days, I’m brooding not so much on all of the above, but another conversation with a visitor. She was with us from A Notable Teacher Training Organisation and had some questions for me. She was bright, keen, open and honest, excited and apprehensive about what she’s taking on. Good for her. But the questions annoyed me and we had to laugh about that: it wasn’t her fault.

For a start, teacher training is teacher training. It’s a worthy and honourable undertaking: why does it have to be called ‘leadership development?’ Doesn’t that undervalue the older folks who’ve been at it for a bit, learned the craft skills and are now actually doing leadership development, rather than the most difficult initial learning of all, how to survive the classroom?

Another question was ‘What are the barriers to raising aspiration’ which almost begs the answer‘My own mediocre leadership and determination to do a bad job’. Yes, we can all do better, but aspiration is a social issue. Poor children, unhappy children, stressed and sad children, hungry children and those whose parents have to work zero-contract, gig-economy jobs to make ends meet and can’t spend any time supporting their school work may find that aspiration comes second to surviving. Poverty and a massive teacher shortage don’t help. Can I reiterate that: a massive teacher shortage? 

Combined with no youth workers and fewer police, what picture does that paint of the way we care for our young in this so-called advanced society? Why are serious, aspirant young professionals being sent out with loaded questions before their bewilderingly quick training? They need an understanding of detailed, thoughtful, long-term solutions, not blame-laden soundbites.
 
I’m a third generation teacher and I’ve been at it for a bit. I’ve seen things change and develop. None of us in the past set out to do a bad job. It’s not just the bright and shiny new intake who’ll want to change children’s lives, it’s all of us. And it has to be government too.  

That’s an old-fashioned teacherly view. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong.   
 
CR 6.6.18

A practical lesson today as I thought you’d like to know what we do at GCSE time. We teach them, obviously, for years on end and practice exams, you know all that. We nag away at them and warn them about deadlines and tell them how to revise. But how is it actually done, in the Sports Hall, on the day, child v examiner?

A big school has a well-staffed Exams Office so they do the legwork with the boards: Pearson, AQA and OCR.  They’re huge businesses. We spend towards £200k a year on exams alone. If you were starting from scratch, is that how you’d do it? Private companies, who also write the textbooks? Isn’t examining compulsory education part of the state’s responsibilities so shouldn’t exams come down with the rations? If they did, would it be more flexible? Could we make educational choices that weren’t affected by business interests and competition? Do we actually need GCSEs now that everyone stays on? 
    
Sorry, anyway, exam boards have rules and we comply with all of them. The Exams team has an army of hourly-paid invigilators trained up and ready to be set loose in the exam rooms. Teachers used to do this, but workforce reforms of the early 2000s decided it wasn’t a very good use of their time. (Despite many of us fearing that unfamiliar faces would lead to mayhem in exam rooms, it didn’t. Mind, it’s an extra unfunded expense.)
​
Timetables are devised once we have national timings and rooms allocated. We have a lot of children who need extra time or special provision. Some need scribes to write down what they know, some need readers and writers.  Some need amanuenses to help them or nudge them to complete. The basic extra-time children are in the main exam hall with the others: the special provisions are spread out around the school.  We’re very full with a high room-use ratio so every room used for an exam displaces a class. Is Spanish in English? is an entirely sensible question in May. 
  
Every exam room needs equipping. The desks so far apart, wall displays covered or removed, exam warning notices put up, corridors outside festooned with QUIET PLEASE, shushers activated.

Immediately before the exam candidates gather in the dining room for counting, sorting, and calming. The subject leader reminds them of the dastardly tricks examiners play, and which questions they should answer. Odd but important - we don’t want a child to take a sudden notion to answer on Buddhism instead of Christianity, or Richard the Third instead of Romeo and Juliet. This morning Madam French said remember the van and while I was in a retro Citroen bucketing around the Peripherique in my head, the youth were nodding sagely and thinking verb, adjective, noun agreements.

We walk them up the stairs in silence and they dispose of phones, bags, watches, waterbottle labels, opaque pencil cases. There’s a photo on each, and berth-finding takes a while. We allow time for the checking of pens, calculators or not, extraneous items on the floor, right papers in the right places. Head of Year is despatched to find latecomers (30 minutes or no exam). Finally, final instructions: don’t sniff, don’t gaze about, don’t ask to go to the toilet, Good Luck and the big number for the finish goes on the board.

Even exam time passes, the standard-time finishers tiptoe out and all flop about a bit on the yard before going to class, a revision session or home. Phew. 
   
Teachers aren’t allowed in exam rooms anymore, so often the first they hear of what was on the paper is when children debrief each other. This can cause palpitations. Is it worse to hear that the paper was easy or hard? Is it helpful to spot a child banging his forehead with a cry of energy, not glucose, aargh?

Last week’s Guardian had a piece about GCSEs and the effect of the exams on the young. It included all sorts of worrying things about stress and the physical effects of exam terror. It cited schools where character education is all about resilience so that children cope with harder, linear exams, and I don’t like the sound of that at all. It talked about the pressures schools pile on and how ticking countdown clocks turn stout young souls to jelly.

I can be smug and say that we try not to be too, well, extra about it. We don’t have pictures up of children who do the best and we don’t spread terror stories about what happens if you don’t get a 4. Life doesn’t actually end at 16 and some of that stuff is just disrespectful to people who aren’t doctors or high court judges, which is most of us.
It’s a really hard circle to square. Post-16 life requires results so GCSEs are a gateway, for good or ill. Has the pressure got worse? Undoubtedly. Does it cause mental illness? Yes. Can we do anything about it?  I’m not sure, if we insist, as a nation, on judging children by educational achievement. For every school panicking about its results there are parents who also have their hearts set on particular grades. For every stressed child there’s an indolent one who needs to be coaxed and hassled to work.

When does raising aspirations turn into unreasonable pressure? When does a reminder of how long there is to go turn from a countdown to a time bomb? How do you deliver different messages in classes of 30 and assemblies of 300? How do we balance the cost of student support services against the price of maths teachers? One hour 45 to answer, use both sides of the paper, show your working.  
 
CR
18.5.18
 
 
 
 
Who’d put children through this?

It’s a large site so there’s a time lag when it comes to gathering everyone up after break and lunch and posting them into the right rooms. The whistles go in order, canteen disembarking first, basketball courts, fields then everyone else. Whistling is creative here so we do it enthusiastically in fancy rhythms. We could set up a Thunderers Orchestra, the acme of creative crowd control.

A whistle makes shouting unnecessary. In a particular context and time, the whistle means: do the next thing, reset your expectations, desist. I happen to know there’s a nautical signal flag that means ‘stop carrying out your intentions and follow my instruction immediately’ but a whistle is much quicker than that.

Long before the end of lunch one wet day this week I wandered into the canteen in search of hot food and found two sirs chuckling to themselves. A child had been running (indoors! near cutlery!) so a desist and reset whistle was sounded. Upon which 200 children gathered their affairs, put their hoods up and went tidily out into the rain, which wasn’t really the intention at all but made life a lot simpler, if wetter. An old grey whistle trick.

On the other side of the freezing yard, this penguin weather has made the year 11 study hall suddenly more popular - or it may just be the ides of May. So, I write in the silent company of 28 boys and 1 girl, all allegedly working. 9 have headphones in - could be GCSE Pod, could be Tassomai, could be Shostakovich for all I know. 17 have eaten sandwiches, one a large bar of Fruit and Nut. As it's spring and the heating’s off, 20 of us are wearing coats. Two are trying to discuss the work silently because I won’t let them speak, one has been gazing at a strand of his hair for 10 minutes as if all the knowledge in the world was written on it in very small print. They’re a rainbow nation, fidgeting through revision, silently. Borrowing a pen silently, reading poetry silently, sharing revision cards silently, not-before-time silently, satisfaction-of-a-job-well-done silently, 2-weeks-to-go-panicking silently. Blowing a whistle would be cruel at the end so I tell them the time quietly and they too gather their affairs, put their hoods up and move tidily into the rain. They’re still working as they go: It’s hydrogen, man; there’s a gothic theme to Jekyll and Hyde; these equations don’t stay still; I’ve done the reading for next lesson, have you? She’s setting us a twelve-mark question. I’m going Library after school.

It makes a change. On another matter, during the morning I’ve been involved in a phone discussion about why we don’t have a schools ombudsman. Did you know that? The Office of the Schools Adjudicator just looks at admissions, we have tribunals galore, but no ombuds. Because of a deal done in 1972 we can’t even complain about that to the Local Government Ombudsman. There’s no importuning route for schools about local government or about schools for anyone.

It’s not as if we don’t need it. The new landscape of schools is, to put it politely, disparate. One might even say fragmented, confusing, chaotic, perhaps unplanned. It’s hard to know where the gatekeepers are when it’s not obvious where the gate is. Or if there is one. Either way, in the ungated field of a thousand blooms who’ll hear a whistle when it’s blown? Where does the frustrated taxpayer get justice or just a hearing?

Whistleblowing is real whistling. It needs people to stop, consider their actions, desist, reset and do the next thing right. It searches for shared and valued norms and expectations and a common language. It longs for quality in consistency, predictability, effectiveness and diligence. That’s not to say a whistle can’t be blown in anger, malice or delusion but that’s seething humanity for you. Access to support, a fair hearing and justice is a human right. As a rallying cry it’s a little arcane but Bring on the Ombudsman.

The DT showcase last night brought the sun with it, and wonderful work beautifully displayed, canapés and music.  I went to look again this morning and found a smallish youth on his knees scrutinising the underside of a Bluetooth speaker in half a basketball, to see how it worked. I’ve commissioned the Black Lives Matter posters for my room and other public places: professional-standard stuff with a necessary message.

And overheard on the bridge: No, you can’t just crack open any egg and a chicken comes out. It doesn’t work like that.’  I assume this was a Biology or Food issue, not a comment on the local elections. It may form part of a campaign: School Ombudsman, because not every egg produces a chicken. I’d give the job to the little chap studying the speaker, he knew what he was looking for.
 
CR
4.5.18

Everything’s cheerier in the sun so I wandered aimlessly around the yard at break to join the general mellifluity. Even teachers whose duty day it wasn’t ventured out for vitamin D, so we discussed Hot Weather Dress For Men.  Does a formal shirt look unfinished without a tie? Is it better if your sleeves are rolled up? How about a shirt with toucans on? What do you wear on the feet with tailored shorts? Meanwhile, half the boys were still wearing puffa jackets and one a pointed woolly hat, the chapeau of choice this season. ‘Must be malaria’ said PE Sir. DT Sir, still in jacket and tie, reminded us this would barely pass as a warm day in Jamaica.

Today’s yard was too hot for a serious discussion of the state of the world, so it was just as well that my political correspondent and I had already met. We revisited the quality of world leadership and the internal problems of our domestic political parties and found them unimproved since we last convened. She’s particularly worried about Brexit ‘Everything’s bad, but this is significant’. Good to be able to tell the difference.

Its recruitment season again and the timescales have concertina-d again. In the old days you put out an ad in the trade press, waited two weeks, read the applications and organised an interview day. Now we put things out very quickly – paying through the nose to do so, incidentally – with a short turnaround. If you’re lucky enough to have anyone apply for a job you invite them the day after the closing date, and sign them up if they’re plausible. We used to get frantic at the end of May, but now we panic in March and April, terrified of posts still filled by supply in September.

And that includes Geography. Geography! Ten years ago you could shake the tree and get 20 applicants, six to shortlist and every one of them appointable. Now Geography is a shortage subject, Teach First ranking them with maths and Science for scarcity. How? Well, part of it is the incompetence of a DfE strategy since 2010 which means that no one is in control of the number of teacher training places any more, yawn because you’ve heard me on this before. Part of it is the result of perverse incentives in school league tables which meant that fewer young people studied Geography in the early 2000s. That should fix itself, as long as the university places also haven’t been cut back. It takes time to grow a teacher, it starts in school and it’s a circular process.  What with not being able to afford to buy anyone in any case, this combination of budget issues and teacher shortages is, as the lady says, not just bad but significant.

As I write the GCSE Art exhibition is on and I’m off to see the A level Dance showcase. Our young people produce wonderful stuff as a result of wonderful teaching and their own intrinsic motivation to create. Who wouldn’t want to be a teacher, especially on a sunny day?

And the sunny day brought a poem into the inbox from a parent, a lovely evocation of a happy trip to school and the perils of teenage road-crossing. We’ll get onto the road safety, but thank you for the poem, which I share.

Sunshine & Music Close to the Edge
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
agree to a lift to school
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
cosy front-seat-chat with my “Tallis Blue”
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
navigating speed-bumps, twists and turns
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
all our “Blues” converging on Tallis
 
Buoyed by sunshine and music
your Tallis Blue on pavement
head phone cords connecting ears, heart & soul
 
One sudden, diagonal step off the edge 
Shock-waves through sunshine & music
Shock-waves through three hearts and souls
Your Tallis Blue, my Tallis Blue and this mother count our blessings 
as we shiver at what might have been
 
CR
19.4.18 



​Image credit: Nicky Hirst 'Elemental 209 2017' currently on show at Domobaal Gallery until 26 May.

While I’m very glad for the NHS that extra funding has been agreed, you can imagine me waiting for the second shoe to fall in the public sector. I was at the annual school leaders’ association conference last week where a wise person described schools as being in gridlock. I think our problems are difficult to make simple, but it was an apposite image and I’m going to have a go at explaining it. Yawn if you’ve heard me before.

Schools’ biggest problems are funding and the teacher supply. Our funding problems are a result of national austerity measures, a much-postponed decision to move to a national funding formula, and the London issue.  
National austerity means that funding has been stagnant for some time, the increased spending that the government claims being because of more children in the system (schools are funded per child). The national funding formula combined with austerity means that the total existing money is to be shared out more fairly. 

That’s good, but there are as many losers as winners. We would be losers. This combines with the London issue.  London schools were funded more highly because of higher costs, of course, but also through the London Challenge, the initiative which improved the achievement of London schools so radically this century. On top of that, there were pension and NI changes which were unfunded, costing school budgets more.

The teacher supply issue is a real nightmare. Routes into teaching are very complicated and have been decentralised. This combined with static pay and publicity about unmanageable workloads to deter applications, so its many years since government teacher recruitment targets were met. In London, teachers leave to move to areas where they can afford housing.  

The link between funding and workload is harder to explain. Schools spend most of their money on teachers so when budgets have to be reduced, we employ fewer teachers. That means three things. Each teacher teaches more of the week, each class is bigger, and schools discontinue particular courses. Or all three. All those add to the work of remaining teachers. Recruitment does the same thing: an unfillable science post after Christmas led to existing teachers getting more classes and some classes welcoming more students. 

All those affect the service parents expect from teachers. More and larger classes mean less non-contact time and more marking. More marking leads to less frequency, and parents worry about that. I worry about everything.  Hence the gridlock. We sit in our schools hooting wildly, but no one opens the flow in any direction. The answer is more money, but will that ever be the message?

I look out of the window and espy a child, teacher and standard lamp combo. It looks like a nice DT product, so I can only speculate on why it’s been taken for a walk. An inveterate shorts-wearer skips past, obviously feeling the equinox to be satisfactory. Two sirs seek a child who left me in the regular manner but is now elsewhere from where he should be. Year 10 are doing mock exams and so we are still in shushing mode. In fact, next year I might instigate a rule where everyone may only say shush on the first floor of block 4 between December and June. Beat that with a stick, silent-corridor schools.

I tangle with some year 10s who let us down badly earlier in the week, and I’m reading a journal about all the things we ask of the adolescent brain while it’s still rewiring itself. However, it doesn’t excuse these malefactors. I’m daunted by the papers’ erudition but that may be faulty wiring affected by my own adolescence downwind of a chemical works. There’s a whole chapter on myths, and I know a bit about those. Especially the ones about running schools without teachers or money.

Unexpectedly, a second pair of shorts crosses my vision while I have a cordial and witty row with a trusted colleague. His parting shot is that it’s not worth carrying on a fight he’s not going to win. That’s just defeatism. Many human myths are about battles of endurance and he might yet win, unlike the children of austerity with no teachers. That’s a battle against the odds and it’s just not fair. 
  
A youth renowned for Irish dancing scissors across the bridge in the between-lunch quiet, thinking no one’s looking. He’s a fine sight. You’ve got to love it.
 
CR
22.3.18  
 
  

I could talk about Ofsted or the snow but I’d rather talk about year 9. If you’d rather think about the other things, please see last week’s or this week’s newsletter.

We’re looking at what happens in tutor group time this half-term. There’s a programme for each year group that involves reading, news, equipment, revision and so on, according to age and proximity of examination and we extended the time to make it better last year. I’ve been allocated year 9. Year 9, as I’ve said before, are always a bit odd. They lack the winsome charm of year 7, they’re more sluggish than year 8 but they can’t quite focus on the future in the way that year 10 nearly can and most of year 11 do. Year 9, against all the evidence, believe themselves to be quite the models of maturity.

Tutor groups are eccentric beasts too. They’re like a large family of up to 30 children with only one parent (perhaps a second if other adults hitch their caravans to this particular train). Tutors demonstrate a range of parenting skills in this rather challenging task. I scuttled round all nine groups one week to assess the weather and this is what I found.

Two groups were watching Newsround and there were the makings of intelligent discussion on current affairs. Two groups were reading the year group’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. What joy to start the day thus! One group was competing ferociously in an on-line book quiz and couldn’t spare the time to be interrupted by me. One group’s tutor had just returned from a residential trip so the family were going through notices that might have been missed. Another group’s tutor was on jury service so the atmosphere was a bit different. Groups like to see the same community parent’s face every day and don’t really like substitution.
One group was having an equipment inspection. This was being done in total silence and, the merest twitch of the tutor’s eyebrow cause the requisite items to be brandished. ‘Two sharpened pencils? Calculator? Two working pens?’ Tutor was just about satisfied by 99% compliance. The shirker didn’t even convince himself that he’d looked hard enough to find his planner.

Next door, however, there was much in hand. Tutor posed the question ‘Why are we so useless at Sports Day?’ and got many answers including the perfidy of other groups, lack of girls or boys of sufficient prowess in all the events, most of the form being too short, tall or weak or having the wrong kit, inclination or motivation. Dismissing all this as losers’ thinking, Tutor then showed a bit of Coach Carter and set out his plans for world domination.  Introducing novelty concepts entirely in line with our Habits ‘We are going to train’  he said ‘We are going to practice’, to a chorus of much groaning.

We assign tutors at the start of year 7 in the hope that most last until year 11. It’s a wonderful thing to be the school parent of a group of growing children, though it doesn’t necessarily feel like that every single morning and afternoon. Children make mistakes, and personalities change through hormones or circumstance, just like at home.  Friendships emerge and disband, some thrive and some don’t. Some like the relative informality of form time, some hate it.

We try very hard to make tutor groups balanced but aspects of adolescent character are unpredictable. Sometimes groups become collectively unhappy and hard to manage, so we move people around. Some groups stay the same for five years and their sense of family and nostalgia when they part at the end of year 11 is heartbreaking.

I had a tutor group for years in a different part of the forest in another century. Our tutor room was a demountable classroom (hut, terrapin, call it what you will) on the far periphery of a single story site housing a 10-form-entry 11-16 school. Tutorial lessons for PSE happened on Friday afternoons for year 9s but we had RE together after that. Including afternoon reg, that was two-and-a-half hours together to round off the week. We had our ups and downs, but we knew each other pretty well by the end of the year. I can’t say that I begged the timetabler for a repeat in year 10, but when we all  left I was touched by the group memories of long cosy afternoons in a warm room with the rain coming down outside. We planned some cracking events that year for team building and charity: car washing, kayak trips, abseiling. We celebrated birthdays and I visited the reluctant attenders. I saw shocking poverty in some of their homes and learned a lot from all of them.

Schools have different traditions and use different language for the same things. I range through form tutor, registration and tutor group to the bewilderment of children I’m interrogating. Tallisees call the group and the person by the same name: ‘Tutor’. As in, ‘I’m off to tutor to see my tutor’. I like that, the group and the person as one thing with one purpose.

So here’s to the form tutors of the land. May you be a good parent to your many children in your busy rooms. May you build up happy memories. May you know them as they want to be known and smile at them every day, even if they’re useless at the shot putt.

CR
8.3.18