Never in my life before have I started a staff end-of-term-do with ‘what a terrible year’ but what else was there to say?

On the last day of the year on Planet Tallis we herd the youth into the sports hall for a rousing send-off with bands and uplifting speeches. Such things – what with us not being Silverstone or a night club – are still being frowned on here so we made do with year 10 being live on spaced-out chairs. They’re a pleasant bunch and we reflected on the year together.

This doesn’t involve free discussion, you understand, assemblies are assemblies no matter what, but we did have awards and a couple of bands played. All very nice.  We all the tutors said a few words and we made some awards to the most imaginative, disciplined, persistent, inquisitive, collaborative young people, then the most respectful, fair, honest, optimistic and kind. Then the ones who turned up for 100% of the time, with no negative points and full participation in all that life offers here. Then it got a bit complicated. Their Head of Year is on maternity leave, and I’ve just promoted their interim Head of Year to Head of year 7 from September, so the person who’s just stopped being Head of year 12 and is now Director of KS4 Achievement is stepping in until the original HOY comes back in October.

This is the kind of thing you can’t sustain too much of. The reason that stability in school staffing is a prize above rubies is that young people need to feel that the adults around them are in it for the long term, know what they’re doing, are absolutely committed to their jobs and the young people who may need their undivided and expert attention at any moment. Thankfully, attached Sir is a constant force of nature with the team and duly got rapturous applause.

Having a captive audience and time to spare, I gave them the benefit of some of my school experiences. I told them that being as old as the hills, I took the 11+, and benefited from its class bias and random educational attachment to verbal reasoning. That grammar school turned comprehensive in my second year, so 120 of us proceeded up the school on top of a growing ten-form-entry comprehensive. Some of the teachers weren’t quite up to it, some aspects of the building – beautiful in its way – weren’t quite built for it and the rest of my compulsory school experience was characterised by a vague feeling of it being made up as we went along. This is not good for adolescents, who are making up their own lives as they go along and need to be protected by stability, predictability and expertise in school. I said I hoped that there was enough of Tallis to keep them confident, no matter what was happening in the outside world and no matter what bizarre and half-thought instructions we’d been tossed about on this year. And the one before it.

Adults can cope with more of this, and, following my uplifting start last night, I reflected to staff on a hot summer day’s experience nearly forty years ago in Leicestershire. I visited the Cheshire Home at Staunton Harold and talked to an old lady who spoke of Group Captain Cheshire – the WW2 fighter pilot who set up the nationwide homes – as a personal friend, who’d taken an interest in every piece of furniture she’d brought with her. I was moved that, in a large organisation, the vulnerable old people felt a personal bond with the man. It made them feel safer and loved. I thanked staff for that same work they do and that same bound they have with the children, so important through the pandemic, a lifeline for some.

Next door to the home stands a church which I’ve probably bored you with before. Built, almost uniquely, at the start of the Commonwealth in 1653 when church building wasn’t really a thing, it bears this lovely inscription to the man who financed it:

Whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times and hoped them in the most callamitous.’

​You can’t say fairer than that. We’ve tried our best.
 
CR
22.7.21

We’re alert to language at Tallis, not that the average bellow of a fourteen-year old needs alertness as you’ll generally hear it anyway. ‘Leave me alone, you irrelevant peasant’ besought one to her friend. Research tells me that this is a phrase used in a video I’m not allowed to watch so it may be terrible even to mention it. However, it took my fancy: no profanity or coarseness, magnificently dismissive. Nothing to resolve so I chuckled orf.

On a diametrically opposite staircase another youth badgered a friend. ‘Is your leg still broken?’ as if it were a personal affront to speedy conveyance. These young folks have places to go and don’t want to be delayed by other peoples’ limitations. Adolescence gets you like that: idealism and impatience, get out of my light, why wasn’t this fixed yesterday?

Which are reasonable concerns. Why are we still facing racism, misogyny, poverty and climate disaster? Have these disasters not been well-trailed?

We spent last Friday’s Community Day talking about gender and violence, following up on the righteous anger of the Everyone’s Invited movement, of which I heartily approve. Outrage is an interesting emotion to share with the young, especially as outrage is now funnelled through social media whereas when I was a lad you had to join a political party or stand in the street and shout.   

We planned an inclusive day, some sessions separated by gender, with options for those who identify differently. The sessions required thought and skilled direction of discussion. We tackled the whole range of the debate and why counter-groups set up with a ‘yes, but’ agenda once an injustice is uncovered. The way that we conducted debate was, necessarily, a compromise. All our children start from different places and have been exposed to different ranges of opinions and ways of living. Understanding the world and changing it for the better can’t just be done on the surface: you have to get under the skin, so there have been many, many further conversations about gender this week.

I may be too phlegmatic about human life. I try to tackle injustice where I can make a difference. I’m worried about the climate. I know a bit about misogyny but I’ve never experienced racism. I’m angry when young people are commodified or categorised and sloppy thinking makes me bang my head on the table. I think that shared humanity requires us to try to make the world a better place and I’m not sure that the echo chamber of peoples’ phones necessarily facilitates global improvement.

But I’m committed to the idea of young outrage and I won’t crush spirits. My grandfather used to say that there’s nothing sadder than a young conservative, meaning that the young should want revolution of some kind, change, and fast. I’ve found myself compromised at every turn this week by a world that’s in a bit of a state and young people who want to overturn every structure and declare a better world tomorrow. As they should.

I turned sixty this week (pause for the cries of ‘surely not?’) and realise that I am beyond decrepit to a seventeen-year-old who’s blood’s up. All I can do it to try to maintain the secure structure through which adolescent anger may be channelled so that when they leave us, to change the world, their views are tested, founded, informed and of material use to the service of the common good.

You remember Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the wonderful poem by Amanda Gorman? That was followed by controversy that a white writer had been commissioned to translate Gorman into Dutch. Rijneveld stepped away from that work with another poem, the end of which reads:

            ……you actively need to feel the hope that
you are doing something to improve the world, though you mustn’t
forget this: stand up again after kneeling and straighten together our backs.
 
All I can do is all I can do. In this context? Make sure that Tallis faces injustices and tries both to resolve them where we can and equip our young with the tools to make a bigger difference than any preceding generation.  To them, my efforts may be crass but, for me, I hope they’re not misguided.
 
The best view from the window this week has been skipping. Some genius procured a sack full of ropes and we’ve used them with all year groups at lunchtimes. They’re skipping singly and in doubles but most of all, in groups in long rainbow ropes. A visitor asked ‘Are these Pride skipping ropes?’ 

I don’t know. They may be part of the unicorn-rainbow vibe that appears to have taken over the world and which in former days I’d be itching to set as an A-level General Studies question ‘Do unicorns like rainbows? How might we know? Discuss.’

Let’s say that they are Pride symbols. Let’s say that all rainbows are thresholds to a better world. Let’s say that every jumping child and every outraged young person is a door to a better future. Let’s do something to improve the world.  
 
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9.7.21

Quite a week, then. Having worked us into a frenzy over Teacher Assessed Grades, everyone submitted them on the 18th then mopped themselves down ready for the next excitement, samples of evidence to go to the board. The message promised on Monday (21st) with a 48-hour turnaround uploading time arrived at about 2200 but with the same window as if it had arrived 14 hours earlier. We don’t think so, said the nation’s Deputy Heads. Shall we call it Thursday morning?. ‘Oh, sorry, didn’t think, yes’. The exam boards have been writing to us about this since Trump was in the White House. They had one job: send us a request on time. Ah well.

I’ve worked with some unbelievably fussy people in my time. People who straighten pictures or match their hair bobble to their underwear (I’m told), people who calculate the time lag developing between school clocks and the BBC and tell the Head exactly how many seconds need finding; statisticians in their upstairs cupboards for whom a progress prediction to three decimal places is evidence of sloppy thinking. You’d imagine exam boards have loads of those folks, but where are they? Locked in a drawer? Messages don’t send themselves. They have to be primed and fired, like those in the Education Select Committee Report published this week.
In the interests of balance, I’ll tell you what’s good about it first.  

1. The giant problem of the underachievement of poor white children and blighted generations in endemically disadvantaged places certainly needs close attention.
2. Teachers have not been blamed entirely, which is a novelty: poverty, alienation, isolation and disempowerment are all mentioned.
3. It is good to see a tidy focus on early years and careers.
4. The report’s recurring emphasis on the need for live deprivation statistics accurate to neighbourhood level so they can be used to target particular needs is long overdue.
5. There is a knockabout routine involving pointy questions on the curriculum and the Minister of State’s rambly answers which would be amusing if it weren’t depressing. 

However,

1. This government has been in power for 11 years and needs to take responsibility for the prevailing conditions.  Austerity is not a naturally-occurring phenomenon, like cold weather at the Summer Solstice.
2. The teacher supply nightmare is unaddressed. A pandemic bounce won’t sustain us for long.
3. The extremely successful New Labour Sure Start early years intervention didn’t close itself. If you dig something out, do you expect the wound to heal over or fester?
4. If a government strips the Office of National Statistics, argues with every release and generalises inaccurately about big datasets rather than neighbourhood information, the stats are compromised.  Go figure.  
5. Curriculum matters. An untargeted focus on academic learning brings an EBacc-heavy curriculum that doesn’t engage children who need a different way into school success. Also, only 37% of poor white children get a grade 4 in English or Maths. The minister says: we need more time to check that everyone’s doing it right, teaching phonics in the one true way, only using approved maths methods. The report says: 25% EBacc isn’t much to show for eleven years. This curriculum drains all the life out of learning unless you happen to love writing and exams above all things. Schools are too timid to broaden the subjects offered in case their progress score doesn’t stack up: it is assumed this is the way of things.

The report covers the ground. Until this point, it’s probably better than nothing. Some feet are held to a warm-ish flame. But all documents are products of their time and I don’t suppose this one could get to the photocopier without being checked for culture-war dog-whistles. In a document of 154 paragraphs, 8 are about ‘White Privilege’, 6% of the total. Why?

The report argues that any school talking about white privilege has been duped by shady academics into divisive (‘pernicious’) thinking that is meaningless to most white people, especially the most disadvantaged. This hides the level of disadvantage they are suffering from the poor white people themselves. Schools should stop talking about race and focus on disadvantage.

What? I was born in Middlesbrough and I’ve worked in Sunderland, Hartlepool and on the outer estates and former mining towns of the Midlands. Disadvantage is not in short supply: there is plenty to go around. Identifying disadvantage in one group does not take suffering away from another and restricting disadvantage, as if only a few people deserve it, is strange thinking. 

The National Curriculum starts with these words:

Three small boys rushed me with a request. ‘Can we start our own club?’ I said it depended on the topic. ‘Japanese Culture’. ‘Manga?’, ‘No, Japanese Culture generally’. I declared in favour with the all-purpose answer ‘Talk to your Head of Year’. Their leader commanded ‘All eyes on Rawlings’ as they charged off. Arigato gozaimasou.

Boys are in the news with the ghastly OFSTED report (as in, a report on a ghastly matter rather than the other thing) into sexual harassment in schools. HMCI was pursued by the Today programme this week on the lines of ‘why haven’t you tackled this before?’ but to be fair to the clipboards, they are at the mercy of Sanctuary Buildings, whom we know to be a bit slow on the uptake. Speaking of which, my Westminster correspondent saw the Secretary of State in the street again at the end of May, customarily laden with bags, describing him as looking like a man about to take the last ferry out. As you would be if your catch-up plan lay in ridicule and tatters and your Tsar had abdicated.

The problem with tackling sexual harassment in schools isn’t having rules and issuing punishments but hearing about the problems to start with. Young women expect that the world will treat them shabbily and therefore put up with outrageous impositions on their persons and emotions. They look upon it as normal to be prodded and put upon, they think they should accept that physical and mental assaults are normal. The report talks about girls being sent dozens of requests for nude pictures and getting dozens of foul nude pictures from boys and men every day. Yet young women are more empowered, more up-front, more determined to stamp out inequity then ever before.  How did we arrive at a position where these irreconcilables co-exist?

Ofsted’s report has recommendations for schools, partners and government:

This should include good sex ed with open discussion, high-quality training for teachers, better record-keeping, sanctions, working with partners, support for safeguarding leads, training for staff and governors, identifying early signs of peer-on-peer abuse, consistently upholding standards, offering guidance that helps children and young people know what might happen next when they talk to an adult in school or college about sexual harassment and violence, and so on.

All of this is important and true and we’ll try to do all of it, but schools can’t turn the tide alone. Violent coercive behaviour towards women is not new, and I wrote last time about the tsunami of pornography that overwhelms our young. Whom does that serve?

And yet, I read in the news today about another school that’s banned skirts. I’m interested in this kind of thing, as long-term readers know to their cost. Banning skirts, on the face of it, could be a liberating act to remove oppressive gender norms from a community. Tell me more, I thought.

Not a bit of it. According to the BBC, the school has banned skirts because ‘members of the public’ have contacted them to complain. Staff are included in complaints, apparently. The usual sorts of words are used: the need for appropriate schoolwear, of appropriate length adding up to appropriate workplace attire. What?

I was reading Hilary Mantel’s essays in the Lake District sun last week. In one, she takes issue with a writer, saying,
"You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares."

I think that about ‘appropriate’. Appropriate schoolwear is clothes that don’t prevent children from learning and rushing about in the sun, that wash easily, dry quickly and don’t break the bank. Appropriate length, is a skirt that’s not going to trip you up on the stairs. Appropriate workplace attire is – well, who knows? It depends on the workplace: what’s appropriate in a blast furnace might be odd in a tea shop. But what business is what children wear to the man in the street?

We are obsessed with surface solutions. Do girls in schools feel sexually oppressed? Send OFSTED to inspect it. Some witchfinder general thinks that skirts are too short – ban skirts. Really? When will we start a discussion about freedom to co-exist peacefully, without prejudice, fear and oppression?

A young woman dropped by to read me a poem. It was about her struggles and triumph and about her determination to make a mark on the world and change it for the better. Perhaps she’ll start the serious global conversation about the mindset change needed to set girls free. I wouldn’t put it past her. I hope we’ve prepared her.
 
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11.6.21

Not that you’re interested, but I have an aversion to clipboards. When a bright young thing proposed improvements to our walkabout procedures demanding clipboard use, I decried the plan. However, the second half of same plan proposed walky-talkies which are unendurable so I wound my neck in and compromised on the clips.  As it happens, it’s worked a treat.

Once I’d recovered from that, A Paper I Don’t Buy appeared on my dinner table courtesy of a visit from my mother-in-law. It had a front page news story about online parents’ evenings. These, says the Recovery Tsar, are the answer to a problem I’m pretty certain has never previously hit the front page, secondary school parents’ evenings’ congestion. Slick software doles out time in packaged 5-minute blocks that the most loquacious pedagogue or parent can’t subvert. All schools are trying this. Conversations are focused, what’s not to like?

Oh tell us, Luddite, I hear you groan, above the wind outrageously buffeting year seven happily around the yard.
My own children were at the school I last led so their father did parents’ evenings. He had a flexible job, a speedy bicycle, a notebook he used each year, a preference for facts over speculation and a brisk manner. Online parents’ evenings would suit him just fine. Not perhaps so for other parents who like to get to know a teacher, or are less confident being upfront about what they want to know, or shy, or worried, bewildered, at home in another language, without hardware or software or the leisure to learn how to use it. Or who just prefer the humanity of face-to-face meetings.

The story in the paper took a particular view of parents’ evenings focusing on what a pain it is to find a parking space and how annoying the queues are. Really? I know people who’ll queue round the block to get into a cool new restaurant or buy a street food shrimpburger. Music festivals and holiday parks are just one long queue with intermittent entertainment. Why is a queue to talk to your child’s teacher suddenly the worst thing in the world?
I’m undecided on online parents’ evenings so far, but I know that some people can’t use them and some people might never enter their children’s school that’s the solution, which would be a loss. I was shocked that the Tsar declared himself so early and immoderately in favour, bedecking himself with flimsy middle-class tropes. It didn’t look as though he was using a very long dipstick and it made me think the less of him.

I also thought: front page? Who owns the software?

Today brought a piece from another news provider which used public sources to tot up which individuals have the most impact at the jolly old Dept for Ed. There are five of them, not including the Recovery Tsar, though the pointy-elbowed so-called Behaviour Tsar is right in amongst it. Even looking at the next few on the list aren’t very representative. I reckon only one-and-a-bit of them actually work in a school, and one of the others certainly has a software interest. What kind of dipsticks are they?

Down among the oily parts on planet Tallis we’re coping with imponderables. First, Teacher-Assessed Grades. This is hours upon hours of work the exam boards, whom we are still paying in full, usually do. Second, Covid. Despite the national cheeriness we’ve had an upsurge in cases. Every one has an effect on our community, of lost teacher or learner time and having to make do as best we can. Third, terrible weather.

Here’s what could help us. Exam boards giving us some money back or at the very least stopping saying that they’re also working harder than usual, which can’t possibly be true. An end to stop presses that teachers can’t assess fairly and will only give the right grades to clever pleasant students, as if we were all corrupt or stupid. A moratorium on doomsday forecasts of the effect of lost learning on poor children’s futures: social mobility had stopped long before everyone started coughing. No lemming-rush towards social mixing and foreign holidays. Some sunshine on the yard.

I overtook a pair of ambling year 12s on my way out of the rain this week. The shorter, not a model of industry in year 11, said to the taller ‘It is what it is. You’ve just got to get on with it.’ I backed this sound general advice so he offered me more ‘He’s a capable lad. He just needs to stick in’ as if he were a forty-year classroom veteran.  Reaching the hall I goggled at ENTRANCE and EXIT ONLY signs, next to each other on the same door. In staying phlegmatic under ridiculously competing vicissitudes, I have much to learn from the young.

I’m perfectly happy with party politics and a free press. I put up with exam-obsessed schooling and I’ve even grown to love a clipboard. What I cannot bear is a feeling that decisions are made by or to placate people at such a distance from schools that you can’t see them with a telescope. Here’s a message for all Tsars and the ministers who own them:  stop justifying yourselves and endure with us for a while. Develop a preference for facts over speculation. Find a longer dipstick.
 
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21.5.21

One of our doors has been out of action for a few weeks. It’s the door I rely on to be able to poke my nose into everyone’s business in block 3, so it is irritating. The situation has its advantages, mind. I can watch colleagues breezing along the bridge only to find yellow tape in the way and enjoy the wild and furious gesturing that follows as they appeal to the high heavens to be spared another irritation. This bridge is really just an exposed corridor and people often behave on it as if they were invisible: dancing, drooping, scuttling about with kit that they’ve borrowed or liberated from another department as well as flinging their arms about. 

I was making myself a pot of coffee (two scoops) when I noted a largish youth had breached the barrier and was using a roadblock bollard to try to hitch a stranded football out of the veranda gutter. I needed to remonstrate, but the locked soundproof door blighted the experience. As I mouthed ‘What are you doing, stop, depart’ and so on, he may have replied ‘only being useful, rescued two footballs already, no one else does it, what’s a boy to do?’ Or something else. Unable to get to him, I made a shooing gesture and he shooed.

Later that day I was in a zoom about the future of assessment, this being much on schools’ minds. We were discussing the utility of exams and their usefulness in encouraging people to think on their feet, against the clock, satisfactorily answering unexpected or devious questions. An interlocutor suggested that maybe only doctors or police sergeants needed this particular skill but I was having none of it. Everyone should have the pleasure of being able to dredge and reclaim a nugget of learning and apply it to an unexpected problem. Parents do it every day. 
The problem is, of course, that that’s all we value now. Children’s 11-year education experience is validated by GCSE exams – or not, if exams don’t uncover your skills. Exams unlock the only door to the next stage of life. If you can’t open it, you’re trapped.  Exams are really useful for competitive entry where places are short – onto some university courses, for example. They’re not a universal key. We’ve made them such because of it is an easy and cheap way of measuring education and, tragically, of measuring children.

Schools should prepare young people to be good citizens in later life. They need a range of experiences at school to help them feel common cause with their peers and they need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills that will help. We can’t afford to close the door on some young people because we can’t afford to find out what they know, what they can do for the common good as they grow. 

May I make a diversion to Hartlepool, a windy spot on the north-east coast where I served some years? Many years ago the good burghers there elected a man dressed up as a monkey as Mayor. This is all to do with an incident during the Napoleonic Wars which you can look up somewhere if you’re so inclined and the chap in question – Stuart Drummond – did have a reason for the monkey outfit: he was Hartlepool FC’s mascot. At the same time, Peter Mandelson was MP, quite a contrast. The people of Hartlepool have been voting again this week. 
Stuart was an old boy of the school which turned into the school where I was Head. He was a lovely man; thoughtful, humble and determined to do his best. He didn’t expect to get the gig but when he did he took off the monkey suit and set about being a figurehead for an exceptionally deprived town. Despite the shock he behaved in an entirely principled and proper manner through three terms as Mayor, a model politician in many ways.  He didn’t bolt for the door, nor did he lock it behind him. 

Doors open and close to admit and exclude. As Herbert and I discovered this week, shouting through a locked door gets you nowhere. Ours was locked until it’s safe to use again, but some doors are locked to keep people out and some doors only open to allow people to escape their responsibilities. We’d all be better off with two-way opening doors, like ours at school are meant to be – in both senses.  

Today’s title is from a Louis MacNeice poem which caught my thoughts years ago

            I will build myself a copper tower
With four doors out and no way in
But mine the glory, mine the power.   

Whether he meant it like this or not, for me, the poem conjures an image of powerful people insulated from the lives of others, serving themselves, keeping people out while still protecting an escape route for themselves. It’s a depressing thought in an election season.

I hope that voters everywhere get politicians who’ll open doors wide enough to admit all of our citizens, present and future. I hope that folks who didn’t expect to win will be as good as Stuart Drummond. Most of all, I hope that they will prioritise education, schools, fairness and children.

Mr Williamson’s talking about phones again. Really, really, that’s not the most pressing issue in any school at the moment. My door’s open if you’d like to know what is.
 
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7.5.21

In late February 1999 I was in everyone’s way in a school office in another galaxy, but I was a Deputy Head so they had to put up with it. While we’d heard email was commonly used in other schools, we were pretty analogue so I was writing a note to stuff into someone’s pigeon while leaning on a 50s tiled windowsill. There was a kerfuffle over by Denise and by the time I’d stuck my nose into it I’d volunteered to do middle school assembly, in 10 minutes time. 720 year 9 to 11s, long thin hall, shocking acoustics, bellowing required.

I’d been desperate to seize an assembly because I wanted to talk about the Macpherson Report which had been published on the 24th. I’d quizzed a year 11 general RE class about Stephen Lawrence earlier in the term and was dissatisfied with their knowledge and their approach. Getting hold of all of them was too good a chance to miss.   So I told them the story of Stephen’s murder, and what happened after it, how the arrests weren’t made, what Macpherson was commissioned to do and what he’d said. I explained the concept of institutional racism and explained that, despite being 99% white and three hundred miles away from Eltham, it concerned every one of us.   I was apparently quite impassioned: everyone was late for period 1.

Stephen Lawrence’s murder and its subsequent handling by the police is part of Tallis history. Stephen went to the old Bluecoat school and then to John Roan sixth form. Tallis people knew him. After the murder, Roan and Tallis – students and teachers – marched to Well Hall Road in protest. Good for them. And yesterday we marked Stephen Lawrence Day in school for the first time and made our commemoration by whole-school clapping in favour of a diverse and just society. Despite the years that have elapsed and the mistakes that were made we committed ourselves afresh to learning to build a better world together, as our cousins in the US will need to do, now that the verdict in the Floyd trial is in. 

Good policing, unarmed and by consent, is a public good when it is fair and just. A robust court system protects everyone’s rights. A National Health Service protects us all from cradle to grave. The comprehensive school system, similarly built on dreams of equality, endeavour, excellence and community should equip citizens with the shared understanding and values that help us all live happily. None of these are achieved without constant monitoring, protection and proper funding. Our society is just like a big school: we rely on everyone to play their part and to do their job with kindness, diligence and integrity.

Year 13 and I have finished our A level course and Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador appears in the last topic and there are some parallels. Like Stephen Lawrence, Romero was brutally murdered; in his case, in his church in San Salvador in 1980 for protesting about state violence and disappearances. His previous professional life gave the oppressive authorities no warning that he might turn the world upside down with his words. Appointed as a safe pair of hands, he became a thorn in the side of the state until they killed him. When Macpherson was appointed to investigate Stephen Lawrence’s murder many people assumed that it would be a whitewash, but he told the police that they were institutionally racist and needed radical and immediate change. He was given a job to do, and he did it, without fear or favour. The title of this piece is the heading to the seventy recommendations at the end of the Stephen Lawrence Report.

In order for us all to be happy and prosper in community we need to be able to rely on everyone else. There’s no easy way to do this. Everyone has to make the effort to do their job well, even if it’s boring or annoying.
Which is what I said to Grace who’d flung herself out of a classroom. When the huffing and puffing subsided it transpired that the major injustices perpetrated upon her were not being allowed to choose her own seat and not being allowed to discuss her work with a friend during a test. ‘It’s so jarring, so jarring’, she wailed. I put it to her that these were not unreasonable requests and pretty basic to the smooth running of school life. We can’t always do what we want.

After I’d deposited her in a safe space my route back was impeded by exemplary politeness where Abdul was holding the door open for a teacher who was trying to persuade him to go first. They appeared to have reached an impasse so I thanked them both for their example, assigned precedence and we all got back to work. 

Despite Covid potentially retreating, the news this week has been generally depressing. We have a long way to go before the world is changed for the better, but our young people made a terrific start this week in their spirited embracing of antiracism, of justice and kindness. We recommend openness, accountability and the restoration of confidence in all of our public life.      
 
CR
23.4.21

For years people have been extolling the virtues of filming teachers in classrooms so that we can be critiqued for what we do on our hind legs with board marker. It came up in a meeting yesterday and I was surprised by a response from an expert colleague who was resistant. Viscerally so, yet with nothing to fear. He’d be great on film. My mistake.

Me, I’ve been through it. In a previous school a thrusting Assistant Head wanted everyone to be filmed so somewhere in the ether floats a film of me in a pencil skirt with a mixed bag of year sevens in a draughty room doing Baptism. I had paper cups, water, locusts and honey, the lot. I did my best Colombo meets Billy Connolly routine which worked pretty well on film, I thought, until the end when I asked ‘who are the main characters in this story’? One child correctly identified John the Baptist, but the next offered ‘Jordan River’, whom she had assumed, for 50 minutes, was a person. As a seasoned professional I could put her right with a labelled diagram, but the camera-operator corpsed and film quality was distinctly shaky as I tied up the loose ends.

You never know what children are thinking. The simplest fact can be misheard and when young memory banks are scanned for matching information, they don’t have much to go on. Tackling misconceptions is key to good teaching. Check what you’ve said, check what they’ve heard.

We’ve been tackling racism this term at Tallis and booting a few misconceptions about.  It’s a long job and we’ve made a determined start. This week, we’ve also been thinking about the issues raised under the Everyone Invited umbrella, where young women have talked about their experiences of sexual violence and oppression at school. I’d like to remind readers that this began as an expose of practices in a small group of schools, largely in the 7% of fee-paying schools.  However, the net is wider now and many young women from the other 93% have told their stories too. It’s shocking and tragic, but I don’t know why it is surprising or unexpected. Misogyny is rife, even in an advanced liberal democracy and we feed it not less than all the time.

If we didn’t have a broad and balanced curriculum to follow I could arrange for teachers to talk to students 100% of the time about the need for kind, respectful and consensual relationships but it might not make any difference. We place powerful machines in the hands of children on which they can watch violent pornography twenty-four hours a day. Good parents model good relationships, monitor phones and talk to their children, especially their sons, but the money-makers can break thorough to children again and again. A child who is remotely sexually inquisitive can find terrible images online, and a child who is not even looking for information will be bombarded with offers of, or ways into, pornography which sets up horrible expectations. It's harder to avoid than it is to get.

Young people take risks. They push boundaries, they try to make sense of the world for themselves. They find it very hard to resist finding or doing things of which adults disapprove. If adults themselves think that such pornography is acceptable, or harmless, or funny, then it becomes normal for children. They don’t know about real adult relationships – how could they? – so they assume that what they see on screen is what everyone does.  In this way, the unthinkable is normalised and adolescent exploration exploited. And it makes money for criminals and for the unscrupulous, who then invite young people to join in its creation so that they may become notorious, or so that they can groom them or trap them.

Depressing? Yes. It takes a village to raise a child and that’s true whether your village has 20 people in it or 60 million. It’s just not good enough to say that freedom of expression has to bear this burden: we shouldn’t be free to ruin young lives.

And the final misconception is that schools have been oblivious to this developing sexual culture. Most of us haven’t been. Most of us have been running flat out just to keep up with the ways that young people can get hold of images that they will never un-see and which some of them will try to repeat.  We can’t do it alone. We can’t stop this with policies or petitions or armbands or punishments. We’ll only be able to keep girls safe when society agrees that girls should be kept safe and when women’s bodies are not objectified – and then takes steps designed to protect children from it.  

It’s been a long term and I didn’t mean to end on a gloomy note. This morning year 7 gathered in family tutor groups all over the concourse to share successes and certificates and awards.  The sun shone and someone mentioned sports day (I’ve got them in training. I’m bringing in weights next term’). We couldn’t have been happier. A small pair rushed off towards the loo and one announced ‘I’ve got a zombie in my bag’. Her mate said ‘Tell it violence is never the answer!’. That’ll do me. We’ll fight the zombie of sexual exploitation and oppression together to change the world for the better. Perhaps we can start by turning off the screens for a bit.
 
CR
31.3.21      

The book of Deuteronomy advises with varying degrees of utility. I take as my text today chapter 22, verse 8 - from the Authorized Version for maximum portentousness:

When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence.

Had Balfour Beatty employed an Old Testament scholar, we would have been spared last week’s added excitement.

I’m experiencing the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders, online. This is usually a jamboree in Birmingham involving two of my favourite things: train travel and a hotel bath. Sorry, did you expect me to say ‘networking with other professionals’ or ‘listening to the Secretary of State?’. This year the sessions are spaced out so I can be mildly annoyed for ten days rather than furious for two. A diversion has been the same question asked of each speaker: ‘What are you doing for your own wellbeing?’ The President keeps chickens, the Secretary of State has a dog (I hope he’s got someone else to train it, his bizarre instructions would scramble the most patient hound); Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector isn’t coping very well at all but walks a lot and talks to her children whether they want it or not. I’ve observed before that she’s a fidgeter. The Interim Chair of the Ofqual Board is following the government’s instructions about exercise, diet and sleep. Yes, yes, we’re all trying to do that.  Me? Jazz, Scotch and detective stories. He may be right.     
 
We’ve been getting a bit shirty aboard the Ark Tallis. What with the return and the testing and the mixed messages about assessment, teachers are tetchy. The best of us are inveterate planners and we like nothing better than having everything under control and the year’s work planned out carefully in advance. This stop-start online-real life malarkey is the very antithesis of what makes for a settled school experience. We are quietly and privately beside ourselves, though generally with a smile you understand. We are also asking each other ‘what are you doing, for your own wellbeing’. The answer? Just about coping, until the roof fell off.

I exaggerate for effect. It didn’t actually fall off. There was a high wind, a funny noise and on closer inspection, large bits of metal deviously working themselves loose three stories up. When suitably equipped folks went to look, they discovered the problem foretold in Deuteronomy so the repair would have to be effected by the equivalent of standing on a step ladder. This couldn’t be done until the wind dropped, und so weiter.

I hate closing – and we’d only just got open – and the testing meant that some children were having other days still at home – but really, this didn’t take any deciding. You can’t risk lumps of metal falling on children no matter how deeply you’re into conditional verbs and screen printing. We declared Monsoon Rules to the irritation of the young who could see that it wasn’t raining and set about getting them home. Everyone was magnificently understanding, thank you.

Unlike Dominic Cummings, who obviously hopes that chucking blame about like a gibbon will distract us from his single-handed undermining of the first lockdown. I like to follow his rantings because I used to work with his mother, and I know the roads well along which he ranged with unchecked eyesight. Deuteronomy is also pretty fussy about people telling the truth in court, and he was brought up in a religious family, so I hope he’s taking note.
Cummings has this week described Whitehall and the Cabinet Office as disaster zones and the Department of Health as a smoking ruin. These are odd metaphors, best used after a catastrophe and not while people are doing their best. He tells us that the outfit he set up, the Advanced Research and Intervention Agency (ARIA, opera lovers everywhere) will both be much more effective and apparently have a ‘higher tolerance for failure than is normal’.
I’ve got a higher tolerance for failure than is normal. We just won’t get some things done and my obsession with keeping everything within tight timescales is having to work a bit loose, like the roof.  I’d have liked to hear that Ofsted will have a higher tolerance for failure than is normal when the nation’s schools start being inspected again, but that wasn’t divulged this week.  

Most of all, we hope that young people’s efforts will not be condemned as failure when we start getting assessment going. Wouldn’t it be great if as well as rethinking the smoking ruin that is the broad and balanced curriculum, and the disaster zone of ‘fail’ to which we condemn a third of grades at GCSE we could also rebuild trust in teacher judgement?

However, the youth are fully on top of this. I followed two year 13 boys along the corridor yesterday and one was explaining a major breakthrough to his chum. ‘You know, the best thing about having timetable for the assessments is that you can, like, revise and stuff?’

Enough talk of tolerating failure when it’s your idea but insisting on it for the nations bewildered young. Mr Williamson, you had nothing of any note to say this week, but let me suggest something.

When thou buildest education anew after these sore trials, then thou shouldst make a battlement for thy children, that they may succeed and not bring shame upon thine house, by being made to fall from thence.

Or in the modern idiom, rethink assessment, please.
 
CR
17.3.21

Trigger warning: another rant about the misuse of Victorian poetry follows. Stop after para 6 if you just can’t stomach it. ​

Once upon a time Headteachers had to be trained for the job. During my second Headship I did the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers (LPSH).  Stop fidgeting, this will get more interesting. Winter 2006, York, as cold as it gets. I bought extra tights to put on under the several pairs I was already wearing.

It left two very clear memories. First, of an ice-breaker task on the first residential. If you’ve been on leadership training you’ll recognise the type of thing, build the tallest free-standing structure you can with newspaper, string, straws and suchlike. I thrust myself into a leadership space pronto and we set about winning the session.  

Not only did we lose but collapsed without a useful tower of any height because I’d put myself into a position for which I didn’t have the skills. I’m spatially poor and struggle to imagine or manipulate shapes in my head, the last person you want engineering any kind of tower. I had no idea how to do the task and failed, taking others with me. In the collective debrief, I became angrily defensive and quite upset. Too few educators have those experiences, so common to children, yet still they bone on about resilience. Hold that thought.

The other memory is of my group of three for the year-long programme. A colleague served at the school in Middlesbrough where a child was stabbed to death by an intruder in 1994. Wisely, he wouldn’t be drawn on how the school was recovering, always answering ‘too early to tell’. 

We’ve had quite an exciting time since I last wrote, but it’s too early to tell how it’s all going to go. We won’t really know for at least 10 years, actually. An unexciting half-term break was followed by announcements about the return and the not-exams. Tallis logisticians and the blessed LA have leapt into action and we’ll manage the return just fine, looking forward to it. The not-exams are more complicated and we are slowly gathering guidance from exam boards, to whom we are still paying huge amounts this year. Which seems peculiar, but there you are. Old rope, anyone?

Playing alongside, the relentless refrain about lost learning, catch-up and recovery, about potential lost earnings and disadvantage all as a result of lockdown. We use no such language on HMS Tallis. The children have had an extraordinary experience and they know less stuff, but they’re still adolescents with expanding and developing brains, which will get back to feeding properly very soon. Politicians, be quiet.

Which led to a discussion about the budget. I say discussion, but actually I was arrested by my interlocutor’s opening gambit: why are very rich people allowed to make decisions about money for poor people? She got the benefit of Roberts’ maxim 427 which is that no one who’s never stood in a supermarket queue worrying that their card will be declined should serve in Parliament. Young Sunak not being short of a bob.

Following it up in the paper yesterday morning, I discover that Sunak quoted old Tennyson’s wondrous Ulysses.  Well, he said ‘that which we are, we are’.  

This is about several of my failings, one of which is a predilection for business as usual no matter what. I’ll come to that later, but let me focus on my onscreen shortcomings first by walking you through my week in meetings. I claim no special sympathy for this experience. The children and classroom teachers have it much worse and manage it much better, but I’m the one writing the blog.

Here we go: three lessons with my year 13 class. Two meetings with the PTI. One with the school union representatives. Three hours in a review with governors and the local authority. Two leadership group meetings, a meeting with the departed Mr Tomlin, two with the deputy heads. One with an achievement advisor who freezes. Several brisk ones with my Head of Department, eight slots at year 13 parents evening. An hour with some local heads, a Saturday morning meeting online with the full Board of Governors. A podcast panel discussion and a 30-minute keynote. In the middle, a bit of time out to have a call with my sister and a solicitor about our mother’s will.
I’ve seen into people’s kitchens, been shown decoration in progress and I’ve marvelled at their pictures and lighting. I’ve asked nosy questions about now-familiar spaces: why is that coffee pot always on the piano? I see family members I’d never otherwise meet and the Clerk to the Governors’ cat. I’ve made remarks that would have been better unsaid, telling Mr Bradshaw that he appeared to be turning into Russell Crowe or at best, Michael Sheen. I admired the Chief Executive of the Chartered College’s matching jumper and crockery. I enjoy it when Mr Malik’s blurred background looks as though it’s consuming him and I’m working my way through Mr Williams’ bookcase.   Tomlin showed me around his new office, beset with cricketing memorabilia.

I’m not great on the phone. I actually prefer online meetings now and I think that it’ll make a big difference to the way we do stuff in the future, less time out of school, but good grief, I’m going to have to improve my game. They truly bring out the worst in me.

A caveat: I can concentrate with the best of them while I’m teaching, but that’s because I’m so worried about looking like a dim-witted oldster with the tech that I’m in a fever of anxiety in case I press a button that loses everyone. Also, like all Heads, I like the sound of my own voice and I have a captive audience to go with my unadventurous slides.  

Teams, Zoom or GoToMeeting, I’m the same in them all. I fidget. I tidy my desktop in the literal sense. I pick at my face, fiddle with my hair, chew my fingers. I pour tea out of a teapot noisily and then slurp it. I rearrange pencils and sharpen them with a retro device clipped to the edge of the desk just like the one in my mother’s classroom in the 60s. I mess about with hand cream and occasionally file my nails. I stare at my hair and wonder what can be done, then I shake it like a dusty dog all over my keyboard so then I have to use the toothbrush in my desk drawer to clear it out. I poke further in the desk drawers to see if anything new has incarnated therein since the last look, then I eat a Fisherman’s Friend. I look out of the window or stand up and walk about.  I think about other things and ignore the proceedings. I interrupt, I roll my eyes, I swivel my chair. I slump, so now I’ve a pain in my lower back. I take my glasses off and on, which in a live meeting signals I’ve run out of patience.

I’m more than usually irritable. I forget to mute and unmute myself but I show little patience with others who do exactly the same. When I’m chairing meetings I can’t read the body language accurately and sometimes get people in the wrong order, adding to annoyance and tension. Because I’m a gazer-about (in real life too) I miss people gesticulating wildly at me to be allowed to speak. And I’ve done something to Teams that means that I’m literally hands-free in that I can’t see the little yellow hands when they go up and I can’t put mine up because it tells me that I don’t have permission. How can that be true?    

Oh get over yourself, you cry. We all have this and some of us spend eight solid hours a day on screen with barely a break. Worse, we expect our children to learn this way, so that they can complete an education that is, in some mystical way, meant to be comparable with the usual sort.

I write in the twilight zone between the exams consultation and its findings. Somehow we’re going to have to make the best of this for our year 11s and 13s and safeguard their futures. Some of them struggle in this world designed for adults with offices, desks, swivel chairs and teapots. Some of them have managed, many fall between, most of them miss each other. We miss all of them and Tallis has to be ready to welcome them back. That’s why we have all these benighted and tortuous meetings, why we try to make sure we’re not letting anything slip that we can help.

We hold trust for our young people whether they are with us or not. We try our best while we’re chartering these deadly waters, but we need to be ready to take them back calmly, warmly, readily when we reach the shore. I’m not going to any meetings that don’t tend to that welcoming.
 
CR
4.2.21

Mr Williamson, please listen to me.

I’ve been worried about your health for a year now and dear me, you’ve had a bad week. Allow me to help your reflections.

Let me deal with the elephant not so much in the room as in your face yesterday, Mr P Morgan of the telly. I wasn’t allowed to watch ITV as a child and old habits die hard, and the man represents the kind of newspapers I don’t allow in the house. Having properly established myself as a snob of the worst kind, I might add that Morgan, P. supported and sympathetically interviewed the former President of the USA several times, only at the very end referring to him in terms both appropriate and unrepeatable. Being interviewed by such a one must be an unpleasant experience. Shudder.

But what were you thinking? You can’t be oblivious to the furore surrounding your continuing as top dog at Sanctuary Buildings. You must know that there is general assent to the proposition that a dishwasher or astute turnip would be a better Secretary of State. You must have expected the question? You surely had an answer prepared?  ‘No, the PM has not asked for my resignation and loves me with all his generous heart’ or ‘Yes, the PM has asked for my resignation but I’ve barricaded Great Smith Street at both ends’ or ‘Yes, I’m keen to resign as soon as a I can find a pen’ or ‘No, as the Kingpin in a palace coup I expect to be PM by Candlemas and you’ll be first against the wall’. Surely any of the above would have been better than obliviously droning about what’s been allegedly achieved. At the very least, you could have said ‘I’ve been precious little use to child nor beast so far but look at the size of my consultation document’.

Piers Morgan, sadly, may not have read it. Had he done so he might have scoffed at the 64 questions. He might even have raised a sclerotic eyebrow at the sentence (p9) ‘That would put [teachers] in an impossible position, as they would be required to imagine a situation that had not happened’. If either of you had ever taught year 9 on a wet Wednesday in November you’d know that imagining things that hadn’t happened is a pre-requisite for good behaviour management.

He might even have suspected that you were about to implode after a sudden change of mindset to one which includes trusting teachers’ judgments. Upon which matter, do you take us for fools? 

‘Centre Assessed Grades’ worked pretty well eventually last year. It gave the correct impression that there was a standard centrally-directed process which schools followed. ‘Teacher Assessed Grades’ knowingly shifts the emphasis. It's reasonable to assume that you hope that all the doodah that descended on you last year when you ploughed on with an algorithm you’d been told wouldn’t work might this year be spread upon the teachers of the nation. 

Why do I think this? Because I’m ancient and recognise treachery when it bares its teeth at me. It is quite a theme of the document. Let’s look at the proposal for mini-exams. First, it is optimistic to assert that all young people are disappointed by not being able to take exams. Some of them will but many of them won’t. Me, I’d have loved not having to take exams.  Second, the proposal of exam-board-issued tests which teachers mark, have standardised by the board and include in the final grade by early July is boggling. Children in different places have missed different amounts of work taught in different orders, so how many papers will be available? How many exam board moderators are there? Are Ofsted inspectors going to be repurposed? What are you thinking?

Ah, but the penny drops, Mr Williamson, again and again. Here’s a fact not in the document: exam boards are not only going to charge for whatever they do this year but they’re going to put their prices up while reducing their service as we mark the things ourselves. For the big businesses that, shockingly, run our formerly independent examination system this is a scheme to print money. Reduce output and accountability while increasing profit. Kerching and thank you, Secretary of State.

However, some Headteachers whom I respect are convinced that exams are the only fair way to judge children, and that teacher assessment does a disservice to disadvantaged children because teachers are prejudiced in some way against them. I think they are wrong. Disadvantaged children are disadvantaged by poverty. If they had space to work at home, parents with secure jobs, good food on the table and a realistic hope of modest security in adult life they would do better.  It is fallacious to assert that exams can mitigate disadvantage. This, too, is not teachers’ fault. 

Mr Williamson, I was myself grilled on both sides at quite a temperature this week. I do try to sympathise.  Although, on reflection, perhaps I could spend my time better.

It's nearly Burns’ Night and I do love auld Rabbie. I’ve procured haggis and tartan napkins, other ingredients being part of daily rations chez Roberts. One of Burns’s biographers observed that he appeared to live his rackety life in the confident expectation of posterity’s attention. You could learn from that. You could certainly learn that the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley and perhaps decide to lay them in collaboration with people who know the terrain.      

I think you should think hard before appearing on any more telly.  Actually, I just think you should think hard. As Burns remarks

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
Yours, at the end of my tether,

CR
22.1.21
 
PS A correspondent has asked me to make good on my promise to comment on the National Tutoring Programme.  Next week, dear readers.

How are you?

Fine, thank you. What difference would it make if I wasn’t?

May I call you Caroline?

No.

How many children do you have in school?

Usually over 2000. Between 30 and 60 since Monday.

Weren’t you annoyed at the sudden closure? How could you get ready for remote learning overnight?

All schools had to be ready for lockdown from September. It’s been a long night.

What about the exams?

That’s a vg q. The PM cancelled the exams on Monday and Mr Williamson says they’ll be replaced with teacher-based assessments.

How do you feel about that?

Fine and dandy. It’s the only remotely fair possible solution. As a teacher it's good to see someone learning from their mistakes and trying to improve.

Won’t teachers inflate the grades so that they’re meaningless and no one has a proper qualification and the world ends?

No, calm down. As long as results are used wisely everyone will play their part honestly. Since you’ve asked, might I rant on about this for a bit?

The ring is yours. Knock yourself out.

Thank you. Problem A is how to grade the children. They’re not less clever than children in previous years, they just know less stuff.  Problem B is that our exam-based system uses memory as a proxy for intellect so we struggle to decouple exams from learning. Problem C is that this particular exam-based system rations grades so you can only get a grade 5 if someone else doesn’t. Problem D is that you’re much more likely to get a grade 5 if you’ve been really well taught and you’ve done all the homework, which depends on your school and home life. Problem E is that there is a teacher shortage and the schools serving the poorest have trouble recruiting teachers. Problem F is that if you are poor, you’re less likely to have the space to do the homework or parents with the time to help you or a good laptop and connection for the online stuff, so you might get a worse grade because you haven’t been able to keep up. Problem G is that government describes a third of grades as a fail. So, you might be trying really hard against the odds and end up with a fail.  

That’s why schools have to stay open! It’s all fair then!

Had I finished?

Sorry, carry on.

None of this is new. The achievement gap between poor children and richer children is hard-wired into our system.  The current GCSE model makes it worse. We’ve been campaigning about this for years, but the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said that proved that Heads were enemies of promise with the soft bigotry of low expectations, also enslaved to The Blob.

Harsh?

Shameful.

Hopeless?

Mr Gove? I’ve seen worse. The exam system? Hmmm. We need a different way of assessing learning. We could start by agreeing that exams are a measure, not the purpose, of education. Might we do that this year, as part of all this, d’you think?

Search me. Ahem. What about the Beetex?

They’re more flexible. The school or college can decide on the configuration of exams and coursework for each candidate, within reason, although since 2016 there are more exams in it. We don’t really understand why. 

Really?

No, sorry, that was a lie. We absolutely understand why. It’s because there’s a doctrinaire elitist view afoot at Sanctuary Buildings that all learning has to be validated by exams which a portion of the cohort have to fail, or else they look too easy.  Are you sure there isn’t another question you should ask about this?

Curses, you rumbled me. What are Beetex?

Well done, I thought you were struggling. It’s always best to ask when you don’t understand. First, snappier pronunciation please – Be-tek. No bees. Second, BTECs are the qualifications organised by the Business and Technology Education Council. They run alongside GCSEs and A levels, you can mix ‘em up, and they’re based on the world of work. They’re modular, and you can resit bits of them. They’re useful qualifications and most universities like them.

Why don’t I know this?

Same way that the PM and Mr Williamson didn’t appear to know or care that they existed. Because of our ridiculous system that prioritises academic qualifications over anything with a vocational slant.  Your editor probably thinks they fall into the category of ‘courses for other peoples’ children’ but then he may be a fool.     
I’m not allowed to think like that, but thanks. May I move on?

Knock yourself out.

Shall we have mock exams?

Yes. We need to find out how the children are doing so we know what to remedy.

Isn’t that too stressful?

Not for most. We can make arrangements for others.

Are you Covid-testing at school? Who?

Yes, we’re all ready. Tables, screens, swabs, people, the lot. Staff, at the moment. Children who are in school next.  The Local Authority is helping us.

What about the children who’ll be really frightened by this?

What do you take us for? 

What do you think of the PM?

I’ve seen better.

How stressed are you?

Not very. I’m pretty old.

How annoyed with the government are you?

On a scale of 1-10? 400.  

Can I ring you up?

Happy to oblige. Ask me about the National Tutoring Programme.
 
CR
6.1.21 

For a man who seems likely to resort to Kipling at any point, the PM’s been a bit remiss, in this our hour of need. People quote If at the drop of a hat, except when it might actually help, it seems.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
 
I’m happy with the first verse which brings me succour. The chances of my ever looking too good or talking too wise are vanishingly small at the best of times and hopeless now when the guidance I get changes each sixty-second minute. I’ll steer clear of the third and fourth verses abut gambling and being a man, but the second part of the second verse is helpful, situated as we are in the middle of an almighty fight between the DfE and the teacher associations and unions. 

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
 
A word on nomenclature here. Unions are precisely that. They are affiliated to the TUC and exist to get the best working conditions for their members commensurate with the job actually being done. I’ve been a member of both the big teachers’ unions: the NASUWT because I qualified in Birmingham and worked in the north-east, both NASUWT-dominated areas. I was a member of the NUT (now NEU) when I worked in London in the 90s, because that was stronger there/here. I was appointed a Deputy Head by John Dunford, and dragooned into membership of SHA, the Secondary Heads Association, of which he became General Secretary and which later became ASCL. I held office in ASCL and have come to know office-holders in the other unions: all good people, all committed to children and schools.

One problem in education is that the same organisations end up trying to speak for schools, teachers and children.  This is confusing and it’s why the Charted College of Teaching is so important. The CCT should be able to work tirelessly to improve teaching without having to foreground protecting jobs and improving working conditions.  Unions can think about those while the DfE then runs the schools in the way that the nation thinks best for children and all our futures.

It’s a pity that it doesn’t quite work like this. The CCT is young but strong. It will play the part of the medical Royal Colleges for us in the future. The unions are trying to protect their members’ physical health in a global pandemic – and trying to get someone to speak for children. The department are trying to keep schools open no matter what. 
While a three-legged stool is extremely stable (even according to the Foreign Office, you’d think they had other things to worry about), a two-legged stool is a ladder to nowhere and the one-legged version is just Gavin Williamson hopping off as fast as he can. Despite the significant collective brain power available in the teacher associations and the Chartered College, the department prefers – or is forced – to make predictable doctrinaire pronouncements that don’t move at the speed of the virus. Of course it is better for children to be at school but that’s only true while it can be done safely, which has to include the safety of the adults who look after them.

I was a member of ASCL executive for four years and I take my hat off to Geoff Barton and his colleagues trying to steer a typically moderate course through this hurricane. ASCL and the Chartered College are right about the questions that need answering: what did we learn about infection rates once schools were fully re-opened in September? What is the risk to children and teachers of different ages, in school, now?  Why not vaccinate all school staff immediately after NHS staff and keep schools open that way? To which we have to add: what is to be done about the department’s new focus on poverty, disadvantage and children’s mental health in the immediate, medium and long-term? And why, oh why will no-one make a sensible decision about exams in 2021? 

I know that children and teachers don’t come very high in the government’s priorities but it has to be possible to do better than this. Shouting at schools through a megaphone then running off and hiding behind a curtain for a few days, releasing the press attack-dogs when the unions patiently explain why it can’t be done that way then bellowing another, contradictory, muffled message a couple of days later that has to be reacted to all over again is not good for any of us. 

Mr Williamson, work with schools. Work with teachers. Work with those of us who have devoted ourselves to this corner of the nation’s vineyard for years and let’s try to sort it out peacefully together. If you can’t, then hand over the job to someone who really can keep their head.

Hoping the New Year gets happier.

CR
3.1.21

Do you remember interference? It was a big feature of my childhood. You couldn’t hear the radio when the hoover was on because it went all crackly. The telly was sensitive to interference too and even the sharpest of slaps on the top or fiddling with the vertical hold knob didn’t always fix it. Happy days. The car I sometimes drive is ten years old with an FM radio. Reception is crackly between Deptford and Peckham. I’ve got used to it and – as if you couldn’t hear this analogy galloping towards you out of the squiggly mist of a 1960s television screen – I’ve got used to government interference too.

May I set out a few thoughts on the surprise announcement to finish this term a day early, and how irritable everyone has been about it?

First, the government needs to be pulling out all the stops to tackle Covid. Whether you think they have or not is up to you. Whether you think they can or not is more worrying. However, like the geography of Derbyshire, that is not the purpose of this piece. 

Second, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to have a view on the purpose of education, a national curriculum, an inspection process and a fair funding mechanism. Whether or not this can all be achieved smoothly when the focus for the last 20 years has been on a spurious ‘autonomy’ for Headteachers is more worrying. However, like the poetry of Thomas Hardy, that is not the purpose of this piece.

Third, it is reasonable that decisions about schools will have to be made quickly in a pandemic. Whether the Secretary of State’s pandemic-handling so far gives one confidence for future decision-making is worrying.  However, like the exams debacle, the laptop promise, the food vouchers, the BBC lessons, rotas and the October firebreak, that too is not the purpose of this piece.

What is, then? you cry, put us out of our misery, would you, please? No, the focus of this piece is how schools have once again been cast as shiftless villains only interested in a day off, in some parts of the media, this week. Given we’ve been working flat out, how did this happen? Might I try to shed light?

No one asked for a day off. Unions, professional associations and other groups made the point severally and singly with evidence and justification that it was no surprise that when schools reopened, infection rates among children rose. Therefore, once Christmas was declared open and restrictions lifted from the day before Christmas Eve to the day after Boxing Day, schools spotted an issue. Covid-infected or Covid-carrying children may be a risk to older people. As Christmas is invariably spent in multi-generational close proximity, young people may well endanger the health of older people. Gran and Max may have missed each other desperately since the start of lockdown, but it would be a pity if the visit had to be summarily cancelled, made her ill or worse. Therefore, schools’ tribunes said, since we are all capable of remote learning now, had you thought about making the week beginning 14th December a remote learning week and protecting everyone?

A further complication was schools’ responsibilities for contact tracing. If the end of term broke into the 6-day incubation period, schools would need to be making phone calls about infections on Christmas Eve, or later.  This required schools in some way to be open to do that – even if it was just the Head, or the Business Manager, or whoever has been in charge of the process.

And now we get to the bit that enrages the public. Heads said: everyone is exhausted and working over the actual Christmas Eve-Day-Boxing-Day stretch is hard to bear. Some of us (not me) haven’t had much of a break since March. Is there a way of avoiding being responsible for contact tracing all over Christmas?

The solution, declaring Friday 18 December to be an in-service training day must have seemed like a reasonable one to the government. We’re not giving a week of remote learning because everyone has had enough of that, Mr Williamson might have thought – though I suspect it's Gibb the Schools Minister who does the thinking at Sanctuary Buildings. Friday the 18th removes schools from contact tracing over the actual heart of the festivities.  Excellent plan! So why was this not met with general applause?

Well, the difficulty is in the nature of training days. These are not invented on the hoof and they are not meant to be a time when everyone catches up on their marking. They are for actual training to improve classroom practice, planned as part of the school’s improvement planning over the course of the year. They are to be taken seriously. If the training is not done that day, then it is acceptable for the equivalent number of hours to be made up at other points in the year, in planned after-school training time. What the DfE should have done is to declare that this Inset day is a one-off under extraordinary circumstances, unlike others, with other rules. What they have done is to tie everyone up in knotted red tape.

Worse, lots of schools – especially primaries, I suspect - had planned some appropriately-distanced festivities which couldn’t easily be reorganised. We don’t do a lot of that here. The tree’s up, Christmas Lunch is on Tuesday, I’ve recorded a verse of the song we’ll broadcast on Thursday and I’m writing this in a Christmas-y jumper wearing antlers, but that‘s as far as it goes. But now I’m embarrassed that the nation thinks we’re slackers. ‘Teachers say not enough time off’ shrieks the headline.

Everybody’s tired. Children of all ages and dispositions have found the last 15 weeks exhausting and so have the adults around them. The zoning separation of year groups eats away at the teaching day and at any semblance of freedom that the children had. This is hard for adolescents to bear who are wired for developing independence in these years: tempers are frayed. It is immeasurably worse for those who’ve had to isolate, some of them, by the cruel hand of fate, for weeks on end. We understand that many parents are struggling. Some heads and teachers have said regrettable things on social media – but that’s tired human nature broadcasting out loud in the modern world.

Which brings me back to the crackle of interference. Fourth (for those of you who haven’t fallen off the chair with boredom yet) it is shoddy for a government to conduct business by press briefing. Whether the current leaders of a parliament which used to be the model and envy of the world can get over this is debatable. However, like Paine’s Rights of Man, that is not the purpose of this piece.

I trust that these extraordinary circumstances will end some day. Until then, we need to look after each other and try to be kind. So, finally, fifth: it is a pity that so much of the media can’t abide teachers and attack schools at the drop of a hat. However, like the apparently perfectly acceptable decision of Eton to close early to protect families at Christmas, that is not the purpose of this piece. But perhaps it should be?     
 
CR
11.12.20

It was foggy when I set off this morning but the streetlights were pretty and the great illuminated buses big enough to see. By the time me and my bicycle got onto to Blackheath it was pitch black. I said ooh-er out loud a few times and hoped that the cross guy who mutters wouldn’t appear for me to run over.
 
Fog and early darkness always remind me of a conversation in a Head’s office on the edge of Sunderland at the end of a day, when the dark sky was all-enveloping. We talked about what it must have been like in mediaeval times, with the same sky, no lights, just the cold and the hills, and eventually, to the west, Durham Cathedral appearing looming above the city as if it had descended directly from heaven.
 
Safely indoors, the clock ticked round to year 11 assembly: Instructions for Mock Exams. These will be important but we don’t know how important. I noted with interest that the Queen of the Mocks referred to the pre-exam gathering place as the Green Canteen. This is catching on, though I call it the Dining Room and one of the chaps on the top floor calls it the Bistro. It doesn’t matter.
 
The curriculum we offer does matter, which may lie behind the continually condescending tone of this week’s post-lockdown briefing from the DfE. While announcing a pay freeze for teachers and public spending cuts that will make learning re-stabilisation harder, they remind us of the blindingly obvious: I condense

• the curriculum must remain broad and ambitious
• remote education must be high-quality and safe,
• schools should plan on the basis of the educational needs of pupils.

Duh. They wrote this in July and trot it out every time. It was annoying then and gets more annoying the harder it is to keep schools going and offer a curriculum that is the same for everyone, the necessary condition for an exam-based system. The tone lacks respect, treating us as idiots.

Which appears to be the Home Secretary’s preferred register, manifesting itself ‘in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing.  This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals’.

And later in Alex Allen’s belatedly published independent advice ‘Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’

And then! ‘There is no evidence that she was aware of the impact of her behaviour and no feedback was given to her at the time………I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her.’

Yet she remains, as the PM has insisted that the wagons circle around ‘the Pritster’.

I am in a Blackheath cycling fog about this and mediaeval darkness has descended on my comprehension. How can someone of such eminence, the Home Secretary, have to have bullying pointed out to her? How can it ever be right to shout and swear at colleagues, especially those whom one is expected to lead? How can she command any respect?

I have long clung to the existence of the Committee for Standards in Public Life as a guarantor of standards of conduct for public officials, from the PM down to lowly ole me. The ‘Nolan Principles’ of accountability, selflessness, honesty, objectivity, openness, integrity and leadership have bound us all since 1994. The current Chair spoke on 12 November and said:

‘The bullying allegations made against the Home Secretary were investigated by the Cabinet Office but the outcome of that investigation has not been published though completed some months ago…..this does not build confidence in the accountability of government.’

He goes on, further, to talk about cronyism in appointments and the awarding of public contracts, the firing of civil servants when the resignation of a minister would have been correct, the avoiding of parliamentary scrutiny by media announcements and the use of ‘just vote us out if you don’t like us’ as a way of brass-necking wrong behaviour.

The system depends on everyone choosing to do right, Evans says. High public standards rely on the individual. ‘It remains that case that in politics, public service and business, that ethical standards are first and foremost a matter of personal responsibility.’ because 'few systems are sufficiently robust to constrain those who would deliberately undermine them’. 

This is a dense area and the argument is nuanced. We are not living in a post-Nolan world nor should any of us wish to. We want high standards of conduct in our politicians because we want them to be good people determined to do the best for their constituents. We don’t want to be saddled with people who, as educated adults, have to be told how to behave. We want government to be built on a foundation of goodness and altruism, not self-interest and showing-off. We expect it of children and ourselves and we have a civic right to expect it of our government.

When we devised the national Framework for Ethical Leadership in Education in 2016-18 we realised that Nolan wasn’t enough, but we needed clear personal virtues to underpin all of our actions. We therefore also committed ourselves to trust, wisdom, kindness, justice, service, courage and optimism. We check our own behaviour to make sure it sets the right example to children, and to other adults. This enlightenment didn’t descend from a mediaeval heave, we worked at it.

The PM is lost in a fog of his own obfuscation. He has made too many personal mistakes to want to shine the Nolan spotlight on colleagues. He looks as though he can’t tell right from wrong and worse, that he doesn’t care. Our children deserve better than this.

CR 27.11.20

I used to work in a central London school with a wonderful indoor concourse that served as a yard because we didn’t have much outdoor space. The senior Deputy Head there used to work in a corner of the staffroom, probably to keep abreast of the temperature therein as we tended to the excitable in the early 90s. Anyway, I needed counsel from this kindly geezer on managing a colleague. I may actually have used the words ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ ten years before Lionel Shriver made her fortune from them. My share, please, Madam.

He suggested we talk without flapping ears so we went onto the concourse and leaned on a banister. ‘We’re alone now’ he said, looking at the – perhaps 400 - children swirling fore and aft. I remember laughing out loud and thinking, yes, we are.  None of them are paying us the slightest attention and the noise covers everything. It’s part of my repertoire now, of course.  
 
I moved on after a bit and didn’t see him again until the day London got the Olympics. He was the Head by then and we were being briefed by the Specialist Schools Trust at a hotel in Chelsea to which I’d made the trek from Durham. It was nice to talk but he looked shattered. He resigned a couple of years later, the school was academised, knocked down, rebuilt. Story of our times.

When I read of Heads deciding stop, to leave, I often think of the man with the exhausted face I met among the happy car-horn hooting of that July day. As an inexperienced Head of Department he was my go-to guy and if I had any success, it was with his calm and constant support.

It's easy to feel alone as a Headteacher. No matter how friendly the staffroom or how long you’ve been there, decisions stop with you and if things are going wrong, its you that has to find a way to put it right. I work hard to gather good people around me, whose integrity and expertise can sort the trickiest problem. If you don’t have those people to hand, or if you’re in a really small school you can feel desperately isolated.

The man above’s movements coincided with the decline of the Local Authorities. I’d worked with a gifted RE advisor in that authority and moved to a city where there was still a full stable of advisors, and then again to another.But those were in the municipal socialist red wall authorities of the north east where the erosion of local capacity took longer. In my first headship, in a tiny authority, there was still good cover for a new head. When I encountered problems – with staffing, with violence, with an arson attack that wiped out a third of our classrooms overnight – there was someone on the end of the phone less than a mile away who would come and, as it were, talk about Kevin. Indeed, when I encountered my first budget deficit I actually sobbed over the phone and the help I needed was there within half an hour.  

I’m not a young or a new head (I say that in case you mistook me for thirty-five) and I don’t know how it feels now.  I’m not surprised that the current circumstances make people want to give up. We’re all reeling from the sheer quantity of previously undreamt-of actions that need to be taken. Not just trying to prevent children or staff getting the damn thing, but then what to do once there is a case. Sending children home en masse used to be something that happened once every ten years for a boiler or water failure, once every couple of years for snow if you were holding the north. We’ve done it twice this week.

It's November, so all schools will be looking at their finances, especially those whose budgets run with the calendar year. There is no money promised for Covid, so we are all looking at unsustainable levels of spending. Some Heads of tiny schools have already spent more than their whole budget on the Covid response.

So imagine how beleaguered, lonely and worried heads, new and old, read this on Tuesday 17 November:

I’ve been guilty of appalling double standards this very day. I took a turn around the estate at break and had five very interesting encounters. 

The first was with a colleague. We’ve been considering de-gendering some staff loos to reduce travel time. This colleague had expressed concern and we had an unsurprisingly frank exchange on Lavatory Habits I Have Known.
The second was with my old friend the political correspondent who is now, can you believe it, in year 13. We stood together to discuss the US presidency when she was a mere stripling in year 9 and were happy to pick it up again. We speculated on the Electoral Colleges – as if either of us knew what we were talking about – and the international coarsening of public discourse. We were foxed by the simultaneous demands of agitated groups to count votes and stop counting votes and agreed that a hallmark of democracy was probably counting all the votes. 
I then pottered over to the year 7 zone where some smaller youth were egregiously not learning from previous mistakes. While Head of Year was dealing with it perfectly accurately, it attracted the attention of me and a Deputy Head.  Outrage and the summoning of parents were mooted.

Proceeding in an easterly direction to block 5, my ear was assaulted by a shrill and regular dinging sound. I raised an eyebrow at the culprit who’d found a nice magnet and was trying it on the sturdy metal pillars of the canteen verandah. All of them. We agreed that the magnet should be returning to its siblings in block 2 while he, it transpired, was needed elsewhere.

Then I smiled at two colleagues on toilet duty (student loos, you understand, we don’t monitor the staff ones) as I headed through the door. We noted that masks require more eyebrow effort when greeting with a smile. They managed it elegantly and with some subtlety, I look like a goggling lunatic.

Then I found myself alone on a deserted staircase with metal handrails and a confiscated magnet that itched in the palm. I may have done some dinging of my own and I may have experimented with picking up my keys with it when I should have been concentrating on a budgetary matter. It may still be on my desk in a paperclip sculpture of my own devising.
       
Later still I taught my year 13s and made them chuckle more than once and saw a child pelting across the grass, arms wide as if practising for flight in the same was as my tiny granddaughter does. (Though she may be being a duck, toddlers keep their own counsel on these matters.) It was a good day.

Earlier I’d recorded a Remembrance assembly piece. I looked at images and words, what we see and hear when we look at or listen to Remembrance. Setting the record straight on who fought in the wars of history is easier now: the archive is unfolding its treasures and all of our young people can recognise themselves in the house of remembrance. The words are more difficult: I talked a bit about Binyon’s 1914 For the Fallen, the Kohima Epitaph of 1944 – and Kipling’s 1897 Recessional because all of them are used, all over the place.    

You go too far! you cry. Invictus was bad enough but Recessional? Ghastly Empire Stuff. Yes. It is, but as long as the Remembrance people produce flags, car stickers, mugs, hats and so on with ‘Lest We Forget’ on then I’ll carry on trying to explain precisely what it means. 

Kipling wrote Recessional in 1887 for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s a eight-line five-verser with the refrain ‘Lest we forget – lest we forget’. That echoes a bit of Deuteronomy which, in the old version reads, ‘then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.’ So the forgetting which we should be lesting not is not the dead, but the hand of God. Here endeth.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that this may not be exactly where the thoughts of youth may tend on Wednesday.  Maybe so, but the sentiment of lest we forget is about the fragile foothold each generation has in history. That empire, those wars were huge, terrible, brutal and costly – but they passed away. No one is alive who read Kipling’s poem in the Spectator in 1897, no-one who fought in the Great War, barely anyone who survived Kohima. Did any of it matter?

We are rightly obsessed with our own terrible times – the virus, furloughs, lockdowns and the US election. Our grasp on the present feels so weak that we might cling to alleged certainties of the past. But as Kipling said - "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre." What will remain of us? Looking into the future, what have we got?

No previous generation has ever tried educating so many young people for so long. We’d better hope that it will help them to understand the world and change it for the better. It will be through them that our best hopes survive. Love, I hope, and goodness. Fairness, honesty, respect, optimism and kindness. Inquisitiveness, discipline, collaboration, persistence, and imagination. No matter what else we lose in the current battles, surely these must never pass away? Lest we forget.   
 
CR
6.11.20

Welcome to the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Protection of Invictus. Someone has to act: things have got out of hand.

My mother didn’t care for poetry, but she furnished my habit from youth and provided the Oxford Book of English Verse from the Literary Guild Book Club. I liked gung-ho stuff and learned a lot of it. Invictus was a favourite as I was all for self-realisation – though she had another term for it. It drives me MAD when I see it misused.

When I read of a school where everyone has to ‘follow Invictus’ and the children are encouraged to learn it by heart I nearly had to self-isolate with rage. I may be misinformed but apparently they suggest that children choose their friends by whether or not they’ve committed this Henley to memory. You can picture the windswept coastal playground chat:

What kind of person wouldn’t take up this challenge? asks the school. Well, one who had read the poem. 

Invictus is a great piece of Victorian rhetoric written by someone who had a terrible early life (and incidentally may have been the model for Long John Silver). It speaks of the undefeated human spirit and is where we get the phrase ‘bloodied but unbowed’. Allow me to quote the last verse:

Schools are pretty hot on charging scrolls with punishments. We call them detention lists, or sanctions or corrections. Children who do their own thing no matter what are prone to end up on these scrolls. If they persist in being master of their own fate they will, sooner or later, be shown the door and invited to take their unconquerable souls elsewhere. Invictus is not about conformity, uniformity or obedience. It is about taking a long view of the difficulties of life and deciding to win through endurance. 

Don’t misunderstand me. Telling children that they can escape the grinding poverty and hopelessness of their birth is an entirely good thing. I’ve led a school in those circumstances and I sympathise with the aim – but it can’t be at the expense of truth. Captaining your soul to a good berth requires a following wind and predictable seas. 

The photographer Chris Killip died this week and his collection In Flagrante has followed me from house to house.   They’re photos taken in the north-east between 1973 and 1985 and illuminate my memories of the same time in the same place. ‘Youth on a wall, Jarrow, 1976’ was for many the definitive image of the time, but as a work of art it is itself timeless.

The school that the boy on the wall went to wouldn’t have bothered much about Invictus. The education he got might not have been up to much and he was probably selected for it, luckily or unluckily. In Jarrow in the seventies his prospects would have looked pretty bleak at 16, but he’d have been used to bleakness. Would it have helped him to go to a school where he had to learn Invictus by heart? Hard to say. If the school was well-run and kindly, energetic in finding jobs and filled with skilled teachers then the poetry could have been an added bonus, a consolation in troubled times to come. If not? Would he have turned the blame in on himself for being insufficiently unbowed? What does the picture say to you?

And now? He sits on the wall rather than going to school. He missed 6 months of education last year and ran wild in that time, with criminals. He might get a grade 3 in English if he works hard with a gifted teacher, but its still a fail.  He can enrol at a college with next-to-nothing, but he’ll have to carry on fighting GCSE maths until he’s 19 while youth unemployment heads for 20%. With what does he captain the small ship of his fate through these menaced waters?

Children deserve to be told the truth. They are free to read poetry and they are the master of their souls but neither puts food on the table. Learning Invictus and repeating it in a community of Invictus-chanters will not prevent you from failure in a system that requires 30% to fail. We can choose as a nation not to provide for the most vulnerable but we cannot escape our responsibility. 

It is shameful to download the failure of the state into the hearts of our children and mask it with the 19th century equivalent of ‘just follow your dreams’. They deserve the truth – and they deserve an education system that cares about them all.
 
CR
16.10.20      

I wrote to parents some time ago with the happy news that we didn’t have a plan B for social distancing, keeping year groups apart and rain - except for coats and umbrellas. Today was monsoon protocol day and thankfully, children turned up in the coats, largely. We’ve got the umbrellas for staff, new, highly visible, personally labelled and carefully branded. Only 2% of them fell apart at the first gust, so that’s not too bad.

However, our senior folks are logisticians to match Heathrow, Disney or the Army and when we saw the forecast they jumped to it like good ’uns. Our devised routes and wet weather zones worked a treat. Year 7 in the canteen, Year 8 at the east end of the sports hall, Year 9 in the dojo, Year 10 at the west end of the sports hall curtained off from Year 8, Year 11 in the main hall.

We have routes. Routes to get them to the zones, out of the zones, to the toilet, to the lunch queue and back again. We have routes to detention and places for anyone who gets too excited. We have different rules for packed lunches, sandwiches and Friday fish and chips and a DMZ between Year 7 and 8 dining. We have routes to the prayer room and the library. We have more routes that you could shake a stick at. And we adjusted them all so that Year 11 could have a live assembly in the sports hall about Year 11-y things: exams, working hard and what they might do next year.

We have staff. Heads of Year who didn’t sit down all day, teachers who volunteered to manage zones even though they taught all day, support staff who hold the world together.

And we have children, who did what children do, at various heights. They sat on the floor and chatted, they leaned against the walls and read, they speculated on romance and annoyed each other quietly. They ate tidily and asked teachers how they were. They had elastic bands to confiscate and water bottles to spin, but they held it together.  They lined up indoors and waited patiently to be led away. Some of Year 8 didn’t cope so well with a whole day indoors, but they’re at an awkward age. Some will need a bit of re-setting next week, nothing new.

And as I passed thought it all, I saw how open and inclusive they are, how friendly and accepting of the foibles of others – including the bizarre rules seemingly normal adults dream up for them. ‘We have to get there how?  Really? Oh, ok then.’

I love Don Paterson’s poem Rain. He talks about looking at lives as if they were in the kind of film that starts with rain and follows its effects on the characters. The last verse moves me every time I read it:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood –
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters
and none of this, none of this matters.

The mess and the damp, the mildly frayed tempers and the setting-rights, the silly acts and the overreactions are all bearable, containable if we can rise up. None of this matters if we have hope and kindness, if we have love. It could have been the worst, but at the end of it, in an empty school, it’s been the best wet day I remember. 

Thank you Tallis.

CR
2.10.20